Composed by the band's guitarist Jimmy Page with lyrics written by lead singer Robert Plant, it is widely regarded as one of the greatest rock songs of all time.

The final section is an uptempo hard rock arrangement, highlighted by Page's guitar solo and Plant's vocals, which ends with the plaintive a cappella line: "And she's buying a stairway to heaven".

[10] In November 2007, through download sales promoting Led Zeppelin's Mothership release, "Stairway to Heaven" reached number 37 on the UK Singles Chart.

[11] The song originated in 1970 when Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were spending time at Bron-Yr-Aur, a remote cottage in Wales, following Led Zeppelin's fifth American concert tour.

Written in the key of A minor, the song opens with an arpeggiated, finger-picked guitar chord progression with a chromatic descending bassline A-G♯-G-F♯-F.

[26] According to Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin:[1] The inaugural public performance of the song took place at Belfast's Ulster Hall on 5 March 1971.

"[27] The world radio premiere of "Stairway to Heaven" was recorded at the Paris Cinema on 1 April 1971, in front of a live studio audience, and broadcast three days later on the BBC.

[28] The song was performed at almost every subsequent Led Zeppelin concert, only being omitted on rare occasions when shows were cut short for curfews or technical issues.

However, after their concert tour of the United States in 1977, Plant began to tire of "Stairway to Heaven": "There's only so many times you can sing it and mean it...It just became sanctimonious.

[36] In 1990, a Tampa Bay, Florida, area station (then WKRL) kicked off its all-Led Zeppelin format by playing "Stairway to Heaven" for 24 hours straight.

WAXQ has conducted the survey annually since then; in each subsequent countdown that has followed, including the most recent in November 2024, "Stairway to Heaven" has been the top-ranked song.

Plant was station-surfing in a rental car he was driving to the Oregon Coast after a solo performance in Portland and was impressed with the non-mainstream music the station presented.

[12][47] In the liner notes to the 1996 reissue of Spirit's self-titled debut album, California wrote: "People always ask me why 'Stairway to Heaven' sounds exactly like 'Taurus', which was released two years earlier.

[50] A lack of resources was cited as one of the reasons that Spirit did not file the suit earlier; according to a friend of California's mother, "Nobody had any money, and they thought the statute of limitations was done ...

If the Spirit lawsuit had been successful, past earnings due to the song—estimated at more than US$550 million—would not have been part of the settlement, but the publisher and composers might have been entitled to a share of future profits.

[51][52] On 11 April 2016, Los Angeles district judge Gary Klausner ruled that there were enough similarities between the song and the instrumental for a jury to decide the claim, and a trial was scheduled for 10 May.

[60] On 10 June 2019, the Ninth Circuit granted rehearing en banc, meaning the case would be reheard by a larger panel of eleven judges.

[61][62] A Bloomberg Businessweek article shortly after that decision noted that a Ninth Circuit judge's interpretation of the laws implied that key elements of many classic rock songs, including "Stairway to Heaven", that were recorded prior to 1978 were not protected by copyright to begin with.

[63] On 9 March 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, California, ruled in favour of Led Zeppelin, in that "Stairway to Heaven" does not infringe on the copyright of "Taurus".

[66] On 5 October, the Supreme Court of the United States denied to grant certiorari to Andes and the trust, leaving the Ninth Circuit's ruling in place in favour of Led Zeppelin.

"[70] Following the claims made in the television program, California assemblyman Phil Wyman proposed a state law that would require warning labels on records containing backmasking.

"[72] Robert Plant expressed frustration with the accusations in a 1983 interview in Musician magazine: "To me it's very sad, because 'Stairway to Heaven' was written with every best intention, and as far as reversing tapes and putting messages on the end, that's not my idea of making music.