Legend: The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers is the second longest charting album on the Billboard 200 Albums Chart with 800 non-consecutive weeks as of September 23, 2023. The album first released May 8, 1984 has out-streamed and outsold all reggae albums in the US. Along and the Billboard Catalogue Albums Chart, Legend has charted a total of 2165 nonconsecutive weeks in the US, eclipsed only by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Mood which is the longest charting album in BB200 history with 981 non-consecutive weeks or 2166 nonconsecutive weeks including the Billboard Catalogue Albums chart.
Legend which has a Deluxe edition has surpassed 5 billion streams on Spotify, the most for any reggae album globally of all time.
The Marley collection consists of 10 Bob Marley top 40 UK hits plus three songs by the original Wailers (Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer) released between 1973 and 1983 such as No Woman, No Cry, Buffalo Soldier, I Shot the Sheriff and Three Little Birds. The album charts at No 106 on the Billboard 200 this week and it previously peaked at No. 5 making it Marley’s highest charting US album.
Other than Bob Marley and The Wailers who played live instruments and created the songs, producers credited on the album include Errol Brown, Chris Blackwell, Steve Smith.
Legend has also spend a record 1099 weeks on the U.K. top 100 albums chart as of September 20, 2023 making it the third longest running album in U.K. history.
The concept for the album came after Bob Marley’s death in 1981 when the reggae icon’s image was growing in popularity but his records were not selling on par with his notoriety. Island Records Founder Chris Blackwell recalls how Island’s then president, Dave Robinson’s eye for marketing is responsible for making Bob Marley a household name and Legend’s monumental sales and chart success.
Dave he said single handedly made the decision to use scientific data to find a market segment for Marley’s brand of music with a compilation album that will sell forever according to Blackwell.
“The market research team asked three different age groups their thoughts (on the album),” Blackwell recalled.
“The casual record buyer liked the idea of Bob Marley, liked many of his songs, certainly the more ‘hookier’,more hummable ones, but didn’t like his image and didn’t get reggae as a genre,” he continued.
In 2022 Luminate, formerly MRC Data, reported that Marley accounted for 212.3 million of the 308 billion of the total on-demand audio streams in the U.S. Billboard reported that Los Angeles and New York are some of the states with the highest amounts of streams from Marley.
“Legend became the one Bob Marley album you had to own, it coulda gone badly wrong,” Blackwell boasts.
The album is certified 15x Platinum(15 million) in the U.S. by the Recording Industry Association Of America and 14 times Platinum in the U.K. (4,200,000).
