Led Zeppelin has suffered a fresh blow in its attempt to regain a US trademark for its mysterious “Led Zeppelin Experience” project.
The band has been trying since last year to secure a new US trademark for “The Led Zeppelin Experience”, the likely name of the band’s planned exhibition.
All three surviving members of Led Zeppelin and the estate of John Bonham have been involved in the unannounced “Experience” project since 2017. The band previously took out a US trademark for the project name in 2019, but the trademark was abandoned in 2025 after the group failed to file paperwork to retain it.
On July 21, the US government sent Led Zeppelin’s lawyers a final refusal that rejects the band’s argument that it should be handed back control of the brand.
The US government previously issued a provisional rejection of Led Zeppelin’s trademark application in December. Now, it has issued a second rejection.
In the final refusal, the US government claimed that “The Led Zeppelin Experience” is too similar to the band’s existing trademark for its name.
“Because the marks look and sound similar and create the same commercial impression, the marks are considered similar for likelihood of confusion purposes,” the US government wrote.
Lawyers working for the US government also rejected the band’s argument made in June that it should be handed a new trademark for “The Led Zeppelin Experience” because the same surviving band members are behind the existing band name trademark and the new application.
The US government pointed out in its refusal that when successfully applying for the original trademark for “The Led Zeppelin Experience” in 2018, Led Zeppelin’s accountant Joan Hudson wrote a declaration stating that the same people controlled the Led Zeppelin trademark as well as the new application.
However, the band hasn’t filed similar paperwork, leaving the US government without enough evidence to show so-called “unity of control”.
If Led Zeppelin does now try to prove unity of control, a potential complication may be the 2021 departure of John Paul Jones from the board of Superhype Tapes, the key Led Zeppelin business that applied for the new trademark for “The Led Zeppelin Experience”.
With Jones seemingly having no further involvement in that business, it could be more difficult for Led Zeppelin’s lawyers to claim that the same people are behind both brand names.
Led Zeppelin has until October 21 to file a request for reconsideration. The band could also appeal the refusal to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, with the option of requesting a deadline extension to January.
The history of The Led Zeppelin Experience
Beginning in 2017, the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin and the estate of John Bonham were jointly involved in the planning of The Led Zeppelin Experience, which seems to have been a planned exhibition with a possible hologram component and potentially live recordings involved too.
The band filed a US trademark application for “The Led Zeppelin Experience” on November 2, 2017. Weeks later in December 2017, Jason Bonham changed the name of his band from “Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Experience” to “Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening”.
Bonham spoke to Billboard in 2018, explaining: “I got a letter from their attorney, who happens to be my attorney as well. As I read the first few lines I felt very upset,” Bonham said. “It was my wife who saved me from getting into a rage; I was about to group-dial Jimmy, John Paul and Robert and go ‘What the hell…!’ but she said ‘Read the rest.’ And I saw it wasn’t personal. They wanted to free up the terminology.”
The members of Led Zeppelin and Pat Bonham set up a UK business named Company 2018 in June 2018 which carries out “activities of exhibition and fair organisers”, according to Companies House filings. Each surviving band member and Bonham own 25% of the business.
Speaking in 2021 during an interview with Eddie Trunk, Bonham said that “there was something they were working on, which from the looks of what the news – just saw in the news the other day, it was possibly something similar to what Pink Floyd had done with the Pink Floyd Experience. I think they wanted the terminology, ‘Experience,’ to be able to do something like that, I guess.”
Speaking to Uncut Magazine for an interview published in its May 2022 issue, Page confirmed that Led Zeppelin had planned its own exhibition. “There was something at one point,” he said. “But all the members and people around the band couldn’t agree.”
Page has also confirmed that Led Zeppelin had been approached about a potential hologram of the band. Led Zeppelin was asked to do “that sort of thing”, Page said on stage at the Hay Festival in Wales in June 2022. However, he explained that the surviving band members couldn’t agree about the project so it “didn’t really get moving”.
Led Zeppelin also owns trademarks for “The Led Zeppelin Experience” in the UK and in Europe. They are due to expire in November 2027.
Company 2018, the UK business set up seemingly to manage the project, remains trading and continues to file accounts every year. However, the continued trading of the business doesn’t prove that the exhibition is still being worked on.
Three P Films, a UK business set up in 2011 to support the release of “Celebration Day”, remains active, as does P & P Touring which was incorporated in New York in 1994 to support Page and Robert Plant’s touring.
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