For the sixth consecutive year, Marley’s Legend compilation album registers top sales in the genre, while no releases from 2025 are present.
Bob Marley and The Wailers’ Legend first released in 1984 is the top-selling reggae album in America of 2025. It also remains at the top of the Reggae Albums Chart list for the week ending Dec. 13, continuing to assert its presence over releases by much younger acts.
Since 2020, when catalog releases and compilations were admitted to the Billboard chart listing, the forty-one year-old collection has reigned supreme on reggae’s year-end listing. Featuring tracks that targeted the white pop mainstream audience and deliberately avoided the genre’s often confrontational politics challenging colonialism and capitalism, Legend has now sold over eighteen million copies in America alone, and many more units globally. This sustained success not only extends the impact of Marley’s legacy casts across the reggae market, but it also suggests that survival within the genre relies on a high degree of commercialization that may involve dilution or diversion from its central social themes.
Meanwhile on the Billboard 200, Marley’s Legend which peaked at #5 in September 2014 currently holds at #151 after a remarkable 916 weeks. The record was first certified gold and platinum in America on June 22, 1988, four years after its release. His position as the only reggae act on the chart for the week ending Dec. 13 highlights the genre’s overall marginal position despite its significant international cultural influence which was underscored by the recent passing of veteran singer/songwriter Jimmy Cliff.
First released by Island when it was still an independent label, Legend now falls under the corporate umbrella of the Universal Music Group, as does the year’s #2 album, Best of Shaggy: The Boombastic Collection. Universal is in fact responsible for seven of 2025’s top fifteen reggae albums, casting a dominant shadow over acts on independent labels. Universal’s UB40 Greatest Hits compilation is at #4, while Bob Marley’s 1977 album Exodus occupies the #9 position followed by one of his sons, Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley, at #10 with Welcome to Jamrock, first issued in 2005. Marley’s 1976 Rastaman Vibration record, soon to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, is at #14. That album is the oldest one on the year-end chart.
As a result of this collective scenario, Universal tops the Billboard Reggae Albums Labels list, while Marley’s Tuff Gong label sits at the summit of the Reggae Album Imprints, with Island in second place.
Among the genre’s high-performing independent acts, the Ineffable Music Group’s Stick Figure occupies three positions on the year-end Reggae Albums chart with records released on the Ruffwood imprint: 2019’s World on Fire at #3, 2022’s Wisdom at #6, and Set in Stone from 2015 at #7. Ruffwood, the custom label of Stick Figure’s Scott Woodruff, is third on the Reggae Albums Imprints list, followed by another traditionally active reggae independent, VP, achieving its prominence in 2025 through the continuing sales of Sean Paul releases distributed by Atlantic Records.
It’s especially notable that there are no 2025 releases that made the year-end Reggae Albums chart. While it has been common for older hit albums to sustain their presence for several years, the total absence of any releases from the current calendar year does not augur well for newer acts or the abilities of their respective labels to challenge the genre’s status quo.
Emphasizing the stasis broadly characterizing reggae album sales, the #15 position on the 2025 year-end chart is held by Ini Kamoze with 1994’s Here Comes the Hotstepper, named after his Hot 100 chart-topping crossover single.
Ultimately then, the Billboard Reggae Albums Chart of 2025 features nine releases that are more than twenty years old and only a handful aged less than a decade. Either the reggae market is far more conservative than many might imagine or the sales gathering mechanisms may require greater accuracy in measuring consumption patterns.
SOURCE: forbes.com