Did Led Zeppelin Steal Stairway To Heaven? | Music Think Tank

I don’t think that any respectful musician should be proud of violating the copyright of another one. With all the social networks that exist nowadays, if someone makes a plagiarism, the news will spread worldwide in a matter of minutes. It is far too embarrassing of a place to put yourself in.

Let me just say one fact, there are more than one million songs released every single year (source: www.quora.com). Do you think is even possible to compare all the existing ones and not find a pair that has some similarities between? I doubt that.

For this case, we’re using as example Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” over the Spirit’s Taurus song. This is maybe one of the most popular cases of musical plagiarism. The subject that tends to get red a lot of folks.

What I’ve heard

I have heard that Led Zeppelin was touring with Spirit months before releasing Stairway to Heaven. The music community agrees (and in few cases disagree) that Led Zeppelin’s most popular song that was released on ’81 with their fourth album was a copy of Spirit’s Taurus. And yes, both songs sound similar.

Conscious inspiration

What I think is that all the bands tend to get inspired from others. When you hear somebody telling that his/her influences are Steve Vai and John Petrucci, his/her work should sound similar to their inspirations. It is normal, it’s what they will listen to most of the time. It’s from them that they learn how to play guitar and carry on. This is what I call conscious inspiration.

Unconscious inspiration

But my intuition tells me something else for this case. I bet you that Jimmy Page (guitars on Led Zeppelin) was barely conscious while traveling with Spirit. When he begins with the melody for Stairway he said to himself: “It seems like I’ve heard this song before”. And that is it. This is what I call unconscious inspiration. Don’t you agree with me? No? :O

In conclusion, I do not think and I do not believe that Led Zeppelin stole “Stairway To Heaven”. So you can be relaxed Jimmy Page, you won’t be in jail anytime soon :)

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