20 Greatest Live Albums of All Time, Ranked

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Published Jan 30, 2026, 10:15 PM EST

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Most albums are recorded in some kind of studio, and so whaddya know: they're sometimes called studio albums. Just as obvious, by the name, are live albums, as they're recorded live. Sometimes, they capture an entire show and then that live show gets released as an experience that people who weren’t there in person can listen to, and at other times, there's music taken from a few different concerts.

Also, these concerts sometimes take place long before the live album’s actually released, so below, the years given are for when the album came out (noteworthy gaps of time will be acknowledged in the text; sorry, you’ve got to do some reading). Also, there’s at least one example below that had live recordings enhanced/altered slightly in the studio, disqualifying it from the label of “100% live,” but if something was largely live, and also good enough, then it might qualify here.

20 'Live at Leeds' (1970)

The Who

Many of The Who’s very best songs were released after Live at Leeds was recorded and released, but this one does still stand as an amazing snapshot of what the band was capable of in the 1960s. It’s also, of course, intended to document how they sounded, and that time machine quality of it becomes more and more valuable the more time passes; the further away the 1960s become.

So, here, you don’t necessarily get a ton of hits, or you don’t if you're more of a Who’s Next and Quadrophenia fan, but still, Live at Leeds is very good. It’s hard to look past it as an important classic rock live album, too, and much of what can be said about this one also applies to…

19 'How the West Was Won' (2003)

Led Zeppelin

…How the West Was Won, though here, Led Zeppelin had admittedly released some of their very best albums before the concerts that were recorded here. Namely, the first four self-titled albums and then Houses of the Holy all have tracks represented here, and so you do get a largely satisfying set-list of songs, even though this being released 30 years after the fact meant other songs could technically have been added.

But How the West Was Won sticks to a handful of concerts from the early 1970s, and compiles music from them in a largely satisfying way. It’s also huge, clocking in at 2.5 hours all up, which does get a bit exhausting at a point, especially when you’ve got the nearly 20-minute-long version of “Moby Dick” right next to a 23-mintue-long version of "Whole Lotta Love" in the track listing, but Led Zeppelin were always a big (and maybe even excessive at times) band, so…

18 'The Concert in Central Park' (1982)

Simon & Garfunkel

The Graduate isn't the only film, by any means, where you can find the music of Simon & Garfunkel. There’s a lot of it in that film, sure, but so much more (obviously) in the filmed version of The Concert in Central Park, which came about a decade on from the duo’s final studio album, Bridge over Troubled Water. So, you really get a bit of everything, regarding what the duo did together, in The Concert in Central Park.

And it exists as a standalone album as well, and one very much rewarding to listen to without the accompanying visuals. The quality of the songwriting and the timelessness of the tracks probably matter most, but then you’ve also got Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel being phenomenal vocalists, as expected, so it’s a win all around. It’s an album that condenses pretty much everything great about Simon & Garfunkel into approximately 75 minutes, and it’s also a great document of an all-time important concert.

17 'Roseland NYC Live' (1998)

Portishead

Partly to help show that this ranking isn't just going to be classic rock and/or boomer-focused, here’s a Portishead live album, and that band is… okay, admittedly quite old as well. Two of their three albums came out in the 1990s, while they’ve had one studio album release in the 21st century. So, not exactly brand new. But good! And interesting. They don’t sound like they were releasing music three decades ago, because that music feels so disconnected from its time, and from any time, really.

Roseland NYC Live has some interesting versions of songs from Portishead’s first two albums, especially because they're an electronic band, and so the songs do have to be reworked, to some extent, when played live, with a little more instrumentation and an orchestral flair and stuff. It still sounds very Portishead, but with a slightly different seasoning, if a food metaphor can be used? It’s cool. It’s a cool live album.

16 'Queen Rock Montreal' (2007)

Queen

It took more than a quarter of a century for Queen Rock Montreal to come out, seeing as the music here was recorded in 1981, and the album itself came out in 2007 (also as a concert film). But better late than never, maybe, and it’s good that there is such a high-quality version of Queen at their peak, since most of the band’s best albums/songs had come out at that point… though The Works (1984) has some bangers on it. That one’s a little overlooked, or over-hated.

You get about everything you could want and expect on Queen Rock Montreal, though, at least for this point in the band’s history. Of course, there’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and a David Bowie-less “Under Pressure,” which is still a great song, even if Bowie’s absent. And the theatrical quality of Queen, and especially Freddie Mercury? That shines through, too, and makes the whole album a great deal of fun to get through, even with its fairly sizable length.

15 'Under a Blood Red Sky' (1983)

U2

The music of U2 shows up on quite a few soundtracks, meaning they're hard to escape if you watch a lot of movies. They were also infamously hard to escape circa 2014, when Songs of Innocence got added to a bunch of people’s music libraries out of nowhere. There’s that whole incident, and some other reasons why U2 get mocked quite a bit, but much of their music from the 1980s holds up immensely well.

See Under a Blood Red Sky, for instance, which has a still young U2 at their most energetic, and also their most punk, not quite doing punk like The Sex Pistols or early The Clash, but there’s an edge to the songs here, and not just because The Edge is on the songs here. U2 live, here, sounds fantastic; quite a good deal better than the more sprawling and less consistent partially live album from later in the 1980s, Rattle and Hum.

14 'Prince and the Revolution: Live' (1985/2022)

Prince and the Revolution

There’s a perfect live album buried within Prince and the Revolution: Live, mostly just all the tracks from Purple Rain, which is one of the best albums ever. It’s so good, this writer genuinely almost just typed in “Perfect Rain” instead of Purple Rain, and barely caught the error. We’re all human and we make mistakes. Except maybe Prince, who was on a whole other level throughout the 1980s.

You haven’t truly lived until you’ve heard the version of Purple Rain’s title track found here.

So, the stuff in Prince and the Revolution: Live that’s phenomenal is enough to make the whole live album great. It exceeds two hours in length, though, and honestly, there are some parts that drag if you're listening to it without the visual component (there’s an accompanying concert film that was released on VHS in 1985, but the physical release of just the album, on either CD or vinyl, took until 2022 to come out). Judging it as a concert film, it’s an all-timer. Judging it as an album… okay, still a potential all-timer, just to a slightly reduced extent. Still, you haven’t truly lived until you’ve heard the version of Purple Rain’s title track found here, which doubles the length of an already lengthy track and ends up being beyond epic.

13 'Live 1975–85' (1986)

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

Bruce Springsteen is one of those artists who sometimes sounds better live than he does on his studio albums, which is saying a lot, considering he already sounds pretty great on many of his studio albums. There are, as a result, quite a few live albums of his to pick from when you're looking at some of the greatest of all time, but the best – and the one that most accurately captures the feeling of seeing Springsteen live – is Live 1975–85.

No surprises here: they're taken from a large number of concerts, but the range here is noteworthy compared to most other live albums. It’s also an exceptionally long album, at over 3.5 hours, so you could possibly criticize it the same way that aforementioned Prince album could be criticized. Then again, Springsteen concerts often exceed three hours in length, so in that sense, it’s just being accurate about how it feels to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live.

12 'The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden' (2014)

LCD Soundsystem

There are some albums that'll be mentioned in a bit that have become more powerful since they were first recorded and/or released, with The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden arguably representing the inverse. It’s still here because it’s a phenomenal – and massive – live album, but it really wasn’t the end for LCD Soundsystem, who announced they were disbanding and finishing on a high with this concert in 2011.

It was released as an album in 2014, at a time when LCD Soundsystem still seemed to be over… but then they reformed in 2015, and released their fourth studio album in 2017. Since then, no more albums. So the history of this band is chaotic. But still, what a live album this is, running for more than three hours and having everything you could want from a live album by this band at this point in the band’s life, plus more. There’s a good documentary about the whole “farewell” concert called Shut Up and Play the Hits, too, and then there’s also a filmed concert in full, if you want some visuals to accompany the (already) phenomenal music.

11 'Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963' (1985)

Sam Cooke

There was a ton of great rock music that came from the 1960s, especially the back half of the decade, but rock was far from the only genre that was worth keeping an eye on back then. Take soul music, for instance, which might've peaked in the 1970s, but might not have been able to peak then if not for musicians like Sam Cooke defining (or at least redefining) what could be done with soul and R&B in the 1960s.

Cooke was tragically murdered in 1964, just one year after Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 was recorded (with the live album not getting released until 1985). It might well be the best album of Cooke’s impactful career, though it’s without (obviously) 1964’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which is probably his defining song. In any event, that one’s got an entirely different energy to the music featured on Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963. This is an energetic album that’s intended to feel like a party (songs included here are called things like “Twistin' the Night Away” and “Having a Party,” after all), and on that front, it’s massively successful, not to mention also hard to resist.

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