Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Bob Marley and the Wailers’ greatest hit collection, received an 18X Platinum certification on December 6 from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), indicating 18 million units sold and streamed in the US.
Billboard’s sales tracker Luminate shows that this includes 5 billion streams nationwide and 13 million pure album purchases.
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The 14-track album was initially certified Gold and Platinum on June 22, 1988. It was published by Island Records in 1984, three years after Marley passed away at the age of 36 from cancer. In 1999, it achieved Diamond status and sold 10 million copies, which was unprecedented for a reggae album.
Legend made its debut on the Billboard 200 at number 54 in 1984 and remained a mainstay until 1991, when Billboard decided that “old” albums could no longer be listed. When the Google Play store lowered the album’s price to 99 cents during a promotion in 2014, the record made a comeback to the charts once Billboard lifted that restriction in 2009.
After the Bob Marley: One Love biopic was released earlier this year, the album sold 30,000 copies and received 30,000 streams for the week ending February 22. This caused it to soar to No. 17 on the 200 list.
Legend currently holds the No. 125 position on the December 14 Billboard 200 albums list. It is the second album to spend more than 14 years on the all-genre chart, behind Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (990 weeks), with 864 weeks spent there.
The album has been at the top of the Billboard Reggae Albums chart for 257 weeks, and it has been the number one album for all but one of those weeks.
Over 4.2 million copies of the album have been sold in the UK, according to The Official Charts Company, and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has certified it as 14x Platinum.
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 wrote, “Island Records had viewed Marley as a political revolutionary, and Robinson saw this perspective as damaging to Marley’s bottom line.”
“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.”
Along with three songs from the original Wailers, which included Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, the CD has all 10 of Bob Marley’s Top 40 UK hit singles to date: 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 for sales of more than 1.2 million copies apiece.
All three songs—No Woman, No Cry (1974) by Live!, One Love/People Get Ready (1977) by Exodus, Jamming (1977) by Exodus, and Buffalo Solider (1983) by Confrontation—have sold over 600,000 copies and are presently certified platinum in the UK.
Three songs—Waiting In Vain (1977) from Exodus, Stir It Up (1973) from Catch A Fire, and Redemption Song (1980) from Uprising—have each achieved 400,000 sales and are presently certified gold in the UK.
I Shot The Sheriff (1973), Get Up Stand Up (1973) from Burnin’, Exodus (1977), and Satisfy My Soul (1978) from Kaya are all certified Silver for 200,000 copies each.
