Bob Marley’s ‘Legend’ Hits 18 Million In U.S. Sales And Streams

Bob Marley and the Wailers’ greatest hit compilation Legend – The Best Of Bob Marley and the Wailers was certified 18X Platinum on December 6, signifying sales and streams equivalent of 18 million units recorded in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

This includes 13 million in pure album sales and 5 billion streams in the country, according to data provided to DancehallMag from Billboard’s sales tracker Luminate.

The 14-track album—released via Island Records in 1984, three years after Marley died from cancer at 36—was first certified Gold and Platinum on June 22, 1988. By 1999, it reached Diamond status, marking 10 million sales—a first for any reggae album.

Legend had debuted at No. 54 on the Billboard 200 in 1984 and was a regular fixture on the chart until 1991—when Billboard made “old” albums ineligible for the listing.  In 2009, Billboard repealed that rule and the album returned to the chart and later peaked at No. 5 in 2014 when the Google Play store discounted the album to 99 cents during a promotion.

Bob Marley & The Wailers: Legend

Earlier this year, following the release of the Bob Marley: One Love biopic, the album surged to No. 17 on the 200 chart after it registered 30,000 units in sales and streams for the week ending February 22.

On the Billboard 200 albums chart dated December 14, Legend is currently at No. 125. It has spent 864 weeks on the all-genre listing, making it the second album, after Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (990 weeks), to hit more than 14 years on that chart.

The album continues to dominate the Billboard Reggae Albums chart dated December 14, having spent 257 weeks on the list and holding the No. 1 spot for all but one of them.

In the United Kingdom, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has certified the album as 14x Platinum, recognizing over 4.2 million units sold, as tracked by The Official Charts Company.

On the UK Albums Chart dated December 11, the album is at No. 57 for its 1163rd week on the listing. Only ABBA’s Gold: Greatest Hits (1178 weeks) has logged more time on the chart. 

Despite its success, Legend has been criticized for selectively featuring Bob Marley’s less political songs to avoid offending listeners and maintain high sales. In 2014, David Accomazzo of the Phoenix New Times highlighted that the album’s curator, Dave Robinson, had intentionally crafted the tracklist to appeal to predominantly white audiences.

“Island Records had viewed Marley as a political revolutionary, and Robinson saw this perspective as damaging to Marley’s bottom line,” Accomazzo wrote.

“So he constructed a greatest-hits album that showed just one face of the Marley prism, the side he deemed most sellable to the suburbs. […] If you’re looking for mass-market appeal to secular-progressive America, you don’t include songs that invoke collective guilt over the slave trade, nor do you address the inconvenient truth that the bucolic Jamaican lifestyle of reggae, sandy beaches, and marijuana embraced by millions of college freshmen, exists only because of the brutal slave trade.”

The album includes all ten of Bob Marley’s Top 40 UK hit singles to date, alongside three tracks from the original Wailers featuring Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer: Stir It Up, I Shot the Sheriff, and Get Up, Stand Up. It also features Redemption Song, the closing track from the album Uprising.

The biggest seller is  Three Little Birds  (1977), taken from Exodus, which is currently certified 3X Platinum in the UK for sales exceeding 1.8 million units.

Is This Love  (1978) from Kaya and  Could You Be Loved  (1980) from Uprising are both are currently certified double platinum in the United Kingdom for sales exceeding 1.2 million units each.

No Woman, No Cry  (1974) from Live!, One Love/People Get Ready (1977) from Exodus,  Jamming  (1977) from Exodus, and  Buffalo Solider  (1983) from Confrontation are all currently certified platinum in the UK, having sold more than 600,000 units each.

Redemption Song (1980) from Uprising, Stir It Up from  Catch A Fire (1973) and Waiting In Vain (1977) from Exodus are currently certified Gold in the UK for moving 400,000 units each.