Zeppelin's: ‘Stairway to Heaven’ Lawsuit Revealed the Band Earns Millions of Dollars Each Year

By editorial board on May 9, 2023

Led Zeppelin's fourth album has eight songs, all of them are huge, and one, "Stairway to Heaven", frequently lingers near the top of lists of the Greatest Rock Songs of All Time.

Led Zeppelin made a fortune when they were an active band. How much did they earn? Enough for drummer John Bonham to pay $85,000 cash for a car just to spite the salesperson.  A 2016 lawsuit highlighted how much Led Zeppelin earns from their music each year. Nearly $12 million per year over a 5-year stretch.

The lawsuit that saw the band defending itself from Spirit’s copyright claims revealed how much money Led Zeppelin earns from its catalog in a year. An economist testified during a 2016 hearing that the band earned $58.5 million over the previous five years, per Billboard. That’s an average of $11.7 million each year.

Led Zeppelin made $2 million from 1 use of ‘Immigrant Song’
If we’re defining “Stairway to Heaven” as Led Zeppelin’s most recognizable tune, then “Immigrant Song” has to be No. 2.   Jack Black successfully petitioned the band to let him use it in the movie School of Rock. The band earned a $2 million paycheck when director Taika Waititi used it in Thor. (CheatSheet)

ABout the song, Plant said “Lyrically, now, I can’t relate to it, because it was so long ago. I would have no intention ever to write along those abstract lines any more.

Plant simply hates ‘Stairway to Heaven’. It has become the forbidden riff that is banned from guitar shops, but Plant was ahead of the curve in bashing the anthem.

Recorded at Headley Grange in Hampshire, Island Studios in London and Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Led Zeppelin IV is the album that put Led Zeppelin into homes around the world, acting as a successful marriage of the hard rock from their second album with the folkier meanderings of their third. It is an album that demonstrates their subtlety and restraint as much as their stadium-filling grandstanding and it confirmed their superstar rock status.

The album was a commercial and critical success and is Led Zeppelin's best-selling, shipping over 37 million copies worldwide. It is one of the best-selling albums in the US, while critics have regularly placed it highly on lists of the greatest albums of all time.

Recording sessions for the album began at Island Records' Basing Street Studios, London in December 1970. The group had considered Mick Jagger's home, Stargroves as a recording location, but decided it was too expensive. They subsequently moved the following month to Headley Grange, a country house in Hampshire, England, using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio and engineer Andy Johns, with the Stones' Ian Stewart assisting. Johns had just worked on engineering Sticky Fingers and recommended the mobile studio.

 

Rolling Stone:your “Stairway to Heaven” lyrics is that you were speaking out against selfishness. Do you feel like people ever got the point of the song?

Plant: "I have no idea. I mean, it was such a long time ago. I used to say it in Zeppelin, 'This is a song of hope.' And it’s crazy, really, because it was gargantuan at the time. The musical construction was, at its time, something very special, and I know that Jimmy and the guys were really, really proud of it, and they gave it to me and said, 'What are you going to do about this?' So I set about trying to write something which I suppose drops into the same idiom as something like 'The Rover' later on, or maybe 'Rain Song', something where there’s some optimism and reflection from someone who was really not [old]. I was 23 or something like that.

And so what do I think now? When I hear it in isolation, I feel overwhelmed for every single reason you could imagine. There was a mood and an air of trying to make it through. The world is a different place. Everybody was reeling from Vietnam and the usual extra helping of corruption with politics. There were people who were really eloquent who brought it home far less pictorially and did a much better job of reaching that point. But I am what I am, and as my grandfather said, 'I can’t be more ‘am’-erer.'"

 

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