Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in London in 1968. The band comprised vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bass-guitarist and keyboardist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham. Their combination of a heavy electric-guitar sound with elements of blues and folk music popularised album-oriented rock and stadium rock and established them as the progenitor of hard rock and heavy metal. They are amongst the best-selling music artists of all time, with an estimated 200 to 300 million records sold worldwide.

Led Zeppelin evolved from a previous band, the Yardbirds, and were originally named “the New Yardbirds”. They signed a deal with Atlantic Records that gave them artistic freedom. Although it was initially critically unpopular, their music achieved both critical and commercial success in eight studio albums over ten years.

Their 1969 debut, Led Zeppelin, was a top-ten album in several countries and features such tracks as “Good Times Bad Times”, “Dazed and Confused” and “Communication Breakdown”. Led Zeppelin II (1969), their first number-one album, includes “Whole Lotta Love”, “Heartbreaker”, and “Ramble On”. In 1970, they released Led Zeppelin III which opens with “Immigrant Song” and contains “Since I've Been Loving You”. Their untitled fourth album, which is commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV (1971) and is one of the best-selling albums in history, with 37 million copies sold, includes “Black Dog”, “Rock and Roll”, “The Battle of Evermore” (which was their only song to feature a guest singer—Sandy Denny), and “Stairway to Heaven”, the latter of which is amongst the most popular and influential works of rock music. Houses of the Holy (1973) includes “The Song Remains the Same”, “The Rain Song”, and “No Quarter”. Physical Graffiti (1975), a double album, features “Trampled Under Foot” and “Kashmir”.

Page composed most of Led Zeppelin's music, while Plant wrote most of the lyrics. Jones occasionally originated songs with keyboard parts, particularly on the band's final album. During the first half of the 1970s they performed a series of record-breaking tours that provoked a reputation for hedonism. During the second half of the 1970s, in which they released Presence (1976) and In Through the Out Door (1979), they remained commercially and critically successful but the frequency and quality of their touring declined as a consequence of Page's heroin addiction. They disbanded after Bonham's death from alcoholism in 1980, after which the three surviving members have only sporadically collaborated for concerts, including the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which featured Bonham's son Jason Bonham on drums, the recording of which was released to acclaim in 2012 as Celebration Day.

Led Zeppelin achieved eight consecutive UK number-one albums and six number-one albums on the US Billboard 200, with five of their albums certified Diamond in the US by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Rolling Stone described them as “the heaviest band of all time”, “the biggest band of the seventies”, and “unquestionably one of the most enduring bands in rock history”. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995: its museum's biography states that Led Zeppelin were “as influential” in the 1970s as the Beatles were in the 1960s. In 2025, Forbes magazine ranked Led Zeppelin as the best rock band of all time.