So, fun fact: Led Zeppelin never had a single break the top 20 on the UK Singles chart.

They had more luck in the States, but not by much.

One top ten single, and a further three top 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. Has the world been lying to us?

Were Led Zeppelin not the commercial juggernaut of the 1970s, the biggest band in the world by a mile and the very definition of the term “rock star”? Well, no, they were all those things; they just went about it in a very different way than most.

The 1950s were a decade defined by the single.

Albums were basically just glorified singles collections, there to cash in on folks who hadn’t followed their favourite artist from single to single.

From time to time, there would be a few covers or throwaway tracks to fill things out, but otherwise, the format of choice for the music industry as a whole was the single.

Then the 1960s happened, and everything changed. The album became an art form.

Yet, it still wasn’t the dominant medium of pop music.

In fact, releasing albums that were considered unmissable was still a level only reserved for the very highest of pop artists, when most acts still lived and died by their performances on the singles chart.

Even bands at that level, like The Who, were obsessed with the medium, as your drawing power could still be measured by how well a stand-alone single did on the charts.

By the 1970s, though, the album was slowly winning the war against the single.

Rather than waiting for a track to drop, fans were content to wait a little bit longer for a whole album to drop.

Thus, the importance of the album and single was completely reversed, with the latter there to promote the album and not the other way around.

Then, seemingly, the final nail in the coffin was driven in when Led Zeppelin became the biggest band in the world while barely releasing singles.

Why did Led Zeppelin decide against releasing singles?

If anything, the band proved how outdated the singles charts were right from the off. Their singles discography is no great shakes.

Not a whole lot of them were released, and the ones that were, even titans like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Kashmir’, did middling numbers all over the world.

There was one solid hit in the form of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, still the biggest charting hit in their discography, yet, after that, the band were quite simply not interested in releasing singles, or, crucially, promoting them.

Now, they’re not alone there.

A lot of bands get tired of individual songs, especially when they have to go on endless promotional tours for them, discuss them, and play them over and over again.

In most cases, their label quite simply has them by the short and curlies. If they don’t do it, they’re in a world of trouble.

However, Led Zeppelin’s album and ticket sales show that they quite simply didn’t have to.

Then there was the fact that their record sales were so behemoth that, if they did release singles after the fact, they would just be selling songs that the overwhelming majority of the record-buying public already owned.

Jimmy Page had an answer for this that was, typically, all about the art.

In an interview with Total Guitar conducted in 2020, he said, “I wanted to stay clear of that market and keep it as an albums thing”.

He elaborated on this, noting, “We didn’t want to be a band that was known for singles.

It was albums that we were going to be known for.

And clearly, I wanted to make each album different from the one before.”

It went against every scrap of established industry logic from the past two decades, but it worked.

So while the numbers might condemn Led Zeppelin to being a one-hit wonder, the facts support what we already knew: they were far too big to be contained to mere singles.

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