Led Zeppelin back catalogue comes to Spotify
The albums will be released onto the streaming service over the next four days
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Your support makes all the difference.Fans of innovative 70s band Led Zeppelin will soon be rocking out to their entire back catalogue via music streaming service Spotify.
Nearly 45 years after the group’s pioneering debut album turned them into global superstars in 1969, their first two records Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II have been made available to stream around the world.
Over the next four days, additional albums will be released at midnight local time, meaning that the full repertoire of studio and live albums will be uploaded by Sunday 15 December.
Thursday will herald the release of Led Zeppelin III (1970) and Untitled fourth album (1971) before Houses of the Holy (1973) and Physical Graffiti (1975) follow on Friday.
Presence (1976) and In Through The Out Door (1979) will appear on Saturday, with those remaining including The Song Remains The Same (1976), Coda (1982) and the most recent Celebration Day (2012) completing the collection on Sunday.
Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Paul Jones and the late John Bonham have sold more than 300 million albums globally as Led Zeppelin, after the band was born from the ashes of The Yardbirds in 1968.
Landmark songs include "Whole Lotta Love", "Kashmir" and "Stairway to Heaven".
As for Spotify, the Swedish service has come under heavy criticism this year for paying meagre royalties to the artists it features.
Radiohead's Thom Yorke famously called it "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse", in an attack that claimed the company was benefiting from major record labels re-selling their old albums for free while leaving new bands to struggle.
The Atoms for Peace star tweeted: "Make no mistake new artists you discover on #Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile shareholders will shortly be rolling in it. Simples."
In an effort to quell the bad press, Spotify revealed that the average payment to rights-holders for a single play of a track is between $0.006 and $0.0084.
The service argues that it offers a higher royalties return per play than YouTube, where the biggest hits attract hundreds of millions of video views. Spotify has paid out $500 million in royalties in 2013 and $1 billion since its launch in 2008.
Spotify announced plans earlier this week to launch a free ad-supported mobile service for their 24 million active users. Previously, only 'premium' subscribers paying £9.99 a month could use the service on their smartphones.
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