Following the release of the Bob Marley: One Love biopic earlier this year, the album achieved 30,000 copies in sales and streaming for the week ending February 22. This caused it to soar to No. 17 on the 200 list.
Legend, which is now at No. 125 on the December 14 Billboard 200 albums chart, has been on the all-genre list for 864 weeks, making it the second album to spend more than 14 years on the chart, behind Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (990 weeks).
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After spending 257 weeks on the list and topping all but one of the Billboard Reggae Albums charts, the album is still at the top of the list.
The album has sold over 4.2 million copies in the UK, according to The Official Charts Company, and has been certified 14x Platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
The album is now in its 1163rd week at No. 57 on the UK Albums Chart, which was released on December 11. The only album with a longer run on the list is ABBA’s Gold: Greatest Hits (1178 weeks).
Despite its popularity, Legend has come under fire for excluding some of Bob Marley’s less political songs in order to keep sales high and avoid upsetting fans. The Phoenix New Times’ David Accomazzo pointed out in 2014 that Dave Robinson, the album’s curator, purposefully created the tracklist to appeal to a largely white audience.
Accomazzo noted, “Island Records had viewed Marley as a political revolutionary, and Robinson saw this perspective as damaging to Marley’s bottom line.”
Added, “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 a 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.”
All 10 of Bob Marley’s Top 40 UK hit singles to date are featured on the CD, along with three songs from the original Wailers, which featured Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer: Get Up, Stand Up, Stir It Up, and I Shot the Sheriff. Redemption Song, the last song on the album Uprising, is also included.
Three Little Birds (1977), from Exodus, is the best-selling song. It has sold over 1.8 million copies in the UK and is presently certified 3X Platinum.
Both Kaya’s Is This Love (1978) and Uprising’s Could You Be Loved (1980) have achieved double platinum status in the UK due to sales of over 1.2 million copies each. Additionally, Live!’s No Woman, No Cry (1974), Exodus’ One Love/People Get Ready (1977), Exodus’ Jamming (1977), and Confrontation’s Buffalo Solider (1983) have all achieved platinum status in the UK after selling over 600,000 copies each.
Waiting In Vain (1977) from Exodus, Stir It Up (1973) from Catch A Fire, and Redemption Song (1980) from Uprising are all presently certified Gold in the UK for selling 400,000 copies each.
Burnin”s Get Up Stand Up (1973), Exodus (1977), I Shot The Sheriff (1973), and Satisfy My Soul (1978) are all certified Silver for 200,000 copies apiece.
