For the fourth year in a row, Bob Marley & The Wailers has topped the Billboard Year-End Reggae Albums Artists chart and the Year-End Reggae Albums chart with their greatest hits collection Legend: The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers.
Billboard released its Year-End charts this week, which are cumulative rankings of entries in Billboard magazine charts in the United States in any given chart year.
The Legend album has spent a total of 202 weeks on the Billboard Reggae Albums chart, and 201 weeks at number 1.
Rounding out the top five albums on the Year-End Reggae Albums chart are Shaggy’s Best of Shaggy: The Boombastic Collection; Sean Paul’s Dutty Classics Collection; Stick Figure’s Wisdom; and UB40’s Greatest Hits album.
Billboard also revealed that Legend, first released in May 1984, holds number 66 (up from No. 77 last year) on the Year-End Billboard 200 Albums chart, which ranks albums across all genres.
Marley continues to make Billboard history
The album in September surpassed its 800th week on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming the second album in history to make it to 800 weeks on the Billboard 200.
The Dark Side of the Moon album by the English rock band Pink Floyd achieved this feat years ago. In 2020, the classic rock album reached an unprecedented 950 weeks on the Billboard 200.
The album was released several years after Marley’s passing in 1981. It collects many of the singer’s biggest hits and several other recordings, and it has gone on to become one of the bestselling albums in U.S. history, with over 12 million sold in the US, over 3.3 million in the United Kingdom, and an estimated 25 million copies sold globally. It also ranks as the best-selling reggae album of all time.
A little less than a decade ago, it was certified 15 times platinum by the RIAA for shifting at least 15 million copies in the United States, and later certified 14 times platinum in the U.K.
Marley also ranks as one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with estimated sales of more than 75 million records worldwide.
