Inside Bob Marley's posthumous empire

Bob Marley. (Courtesy)

Marley died in 1981 at the age of 36. He’d achieved a level of mainstream success unrivalled by other reggae acts, and he did so while challenging global capitalism and speaking to the oppressed.

This image, however, is fundamentally at odds with what has happened to Marley’s name and likeness since his death.

Now you can buy Bob Marley backpacks, Bob Marley jigsaw puzzles – even Bob Marley flip-flops.

The accusation of “selling out” could once seriously threaten an artist’s credibility; the insult wields far less power in an era when an artist’s survival often depends on sponsorship and licensing deals.

In its 2023 list of highest-paid dead celebrities, Forbes placed Marley in the ninth slot, right behind former Beatles front man John Lennon. According to the publication, Marley earned US$16 million – or rather, his estate did.

Marley’s business affairs are now controlled by family members – the estate – who have made deals with various merchandising and marketing partners, with all parties sharing in the profits.

The commercial power of Bob Marley’s name generates the royalties earned by the estate, though precise percentages are not publicly available.

One posthumous musical release, in particular, has been a gold mine: Marley’s “Legend” compilation album.

Released in 1984 and featuring mainstays like “Could You Be Loved” and “Three Little Birds,” it’s the most successful reggae album of all time. It has sold over 15 million copies in the U.S and has spent more than 800 nonconsecutive weeks on the Billboard 200.

Collectively, its tracks have accounted for well over 4 billion Spotify streams, and its phenomenal success is a key reason that the private music publishing company Primary Wave, which is backed by investors such as BlackRock, spent over $50 million to buy a share of Marley’s publishing catalog in 2018.

A series of other albums have been released after Marley’s death.

These include “Natural Mystic” (1995); the pop and hip-hop crossover “Chant Down Babylon” (1999); “Africa Unite” (2005); “Uprising Live!” (2014), which features his final concert appearance; the polarizing electronic mashup “Legend Remixed” (2013); “Easy Skanking in Boston ’78” (2015); and the curious “Bob Marley & the Chineke! Orchestra” (2022).

In his 2022 autobiography, Chris Blackwell, the former head of Island Records, the label that brought Marley’s music to mainstream listeners, revealed that “Legend” had been carefully tailored for white mainstream audiences.

It achieved this by prioritizing songs centered on themes of love and peace, rather than those about Marley’s revolutionary Afrocentric politics and Rastafarian worldview, which appear on records such as 1979’s “Survival.”

On that album’s second track, “Zimbabwe,” Marley commends the country’s freedom fighters in their battle against the oppressive Rhodesian regime, declaring, “Every man got a right to decide his own destiny”; he rails against the forces of exploitation and division in “Top Rankin’” and “Babylon System”; in “Survival,” he hails the African world’s “hopes and dreams” and “ways and means”; and “Wake Up and Live” is a clarion call to spiritual and political awakening.

In an era of minuscule music royalties, a large portion of that $16 million in earnings also comes from merchandising, which has further watered down Marley’s revolutionary politics and spiritualism.

Critiquing any aspect of Bob Marley’s legacy can elicit defensive responses. The estate has long portrayed the rampant commercialization of the Marley name and image as an important way to sustain and spread the artist’s ideals.

However, I think it’s important to ensure that the artistic and cultural values embedded in his music do not become clouded in a haze of consumerism.

-This article was first published by The Conversation.