Legend has peaked at number 5 on the
Billboard 200, making it Marley's highest-charting album in the US. It also holds the distinction of being the second-longest-charting album in the history of
Billboard magazine. Combining its chart life on the
Billboard 200 and the
Billboard Catalog Albums charts,
Legend has had a chart run of 2165 nonconsecutive weeks, surpassed only by
Pink Floyd's
The Dark Side of the Moon at 2166 nonconsecutive weeks. As of the
Billboard issue dated 9 May 2026, the album has charted on the
Billboard 200 for 937 nonconsecutive weeks, and is only the second album to spend at least 900 weeks on the chart (the first being
Pink Floyd's 1973 studio album,
The Dark Side of the Moon). In the United Kingdom,
Legend has been certified 13× Platinum, and is the 16th-best-selling album of all time in that country, with sales of over 3,380,000 as of July 2016. As of 6 May 2026, the album has spent 1,236 weeks in the top 100 of the official UK Albums Chart, placing it third on the
all-time longevity list. Despite its generally positive reception,
Legend has been criticized for being a deliberately inoffensive selection of Marley's less political music, shorn of any radicalism that might damage sales. In 2014 in the
Phoenix New Times, David Accomazzo wrote "Dave Robinson, who constructed the tracklist for
Legend, [said that] the tracklist for
Legend deliberately was designed to appeal to
white audiences.
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. [...] the songs on
Legend offer just a brief glimpse into his music. The definitive album of the most important reggae singer of all time is a hodgepodge collection of love songs, feel-good sentiment, and mere hints of the fiery activist whose politics drew bullets in the '70s."
Vivien Goldman wrote in 2015, "when he does get played on the radio now, it's the mellow songs, not the angry songs, that get heard – the ones that have been compiled on albums such as
Legend." ==Track listings==