France Album Sales: Bob Marley

PART iv: Legend lives on 1984-2015

Legend (1984) Era

No matter the promotion you will use to sell a best of album, what ultimately matters is the tracklist. A compilation is the combination of the attractiveness of all songs featured on it. The point is that the 14 tracks present on Legend album average for 51 million Spotify plays as of today. To put this figure into perspective, Like A Prayer is by very far the most listened track by Madonna but has yet to reach 30 million, meaning each of the 14 Legend songs are on average 70% stronger than Madonna biggest hit.

With such a powerful set of tracks, the album went on to become an out of this world catalog seller, quite simply the biggest out of every album you can think of. In France it was no exception as the album first went Gold only after several months due to the absence of promotion, but still achieved gigantic sales of 1,895,000 units up to the end of 2015.

A consumers catalyst as big as this one may imply the end of catalog sales for original studio albums in the same way Gold and other minor hits packages destroyed catalog sales of ABBA original albums. The cult following of Bob Marley enabled his entire discography to still move incredible numbers even when excluding Legend.