Bob Marley , a reggae music icon may have left us long back, but his songs continue to inspire us and more importantly make money.
Marley is credited with popularizing reggae around the globe. Moreover, he is the one that could also be credited to have grabbed worldwide attention to the Rastafari movement. Some of his hit songs include “No Woman, No Cry”, “Jamming”, and “One Love” and they have continued to be featured in top 10 hits in almost all corners of the world.
Bob Marley was officially named as the fifth top earning celebrity posthumously , by Forbes Magazine . Additionally, Bob is the only Caribbean artist to have made it into the list which mostly includes super-rich North Americans and the British elite.
Despite having deceased for over 3 decades, Marley’s current estimated net worth is around 130 Million Dollars. Being a singer as well as a songwriter, Bob Marley had reinvented reggae and found admiration from Millions of his fans worldwide. His songs weren’t just about love, but they portrayed hope, joy and the pursuit of simple happiness among the fellow human beings and staying close to the form, mother nature intended for supposedly the most superior race on the planet.
Bob Marely is one of the very rare breed of singers to have gone not just Gold or Platinum, but Diamond, with his album ‘Legend’, which was coincidentally released in 1984, over 3 years after his untimely death at the ridiculously young age of 36. His songs have been so popular, during the course of last 20 years Marley has sold more than 75 million albums, reported New Pittsburgh Courier .
The ‘Legend’ album still manages to connect with the souls of his old as well as new fans and sells more than 250,000 copies each year; a feat even modern day artists find hard to pull–off. Bob Marley may have discovered a whole new way to connect with his fans in the digital age. Majority of his albums are sold as singles via digital retailers. In fact, Google Music and iTunes are some of the most popular virtual stores through which Bob Marley’s albums just continue to ‘fly off the shelf’.
However, all this money being made off a person who isn’t still alive, directly translates to legal feuds between Music Publishers. Chris Blackwell’s Blue Mountain Music is set to defend their alleged misattribution, against plaintiff Cayman Music, reported Jamaica Observer .
While Cayman Music was the original, long-standing publisher for Bob Marley, who represented his catalogue from 1967 to late 1976, Island Records is apparently laying claim on some of the most popular hits from Bob Marley including “No Woman, No Cry”.
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