American singer, songwriter, and guitarist Thomas Earl 'Tom' Petty was born 20 October 1950 is the frontman of Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, and was a member of the Traveling Wilburys (with George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison). Petty is a vocal critic of the recordindustry and the disappearance of independent radio stations.

His interest in rock and roll music began at age 11 when he met Elvis Presley. In the summer of 1961, his uncle was working on the set of Presley's film 'Follow That Dream' and invited Petty to come down and watch the shoot. He instantly became an Elvis Presley fan and soon traded his Wham-O slingshot for a box of Elvis 45s. In a 2006 radio interview, Petty said that he knew he wanted to be in a band the moment he saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was once a member of the University of Florida's grounds crew (though he was never a student there) and planted a tree that is now called the Tom Petty tree.

Tom Petty has been supported by his band, The Heartbreakers, for the majority of his career. He has occasionally released solo work (as is the case with 2006's 'Highway Companion', on which he performed most of the backing instrumentation himself). However, members of The Heartbreakers have played on each of his solo albums and the band has always backed him when touring in support of those albums. In 1989, Petty released Full Moon Fever, which featured hits 'I Won't Back Down', "Free Fallin'' and 'Runnin' Down A Dream'. It was nominally his first solo album, although several Heartbreakers and other well-known musicians participated.

Petty has been honoured with 18 Grammy Award nominations since 1981. In that year he received his first nomination for 'Stop Draggin' My Heart Around'. As a member of the Traveling Wilburys, he earned a Grammy Award in 1989 for 'Traveling Wilburys Volume One'. In 1995 he received another Grammy for 'You Don't Know How It Feels' and engineers David Bianco, Jim Scott, Richard Dodd and Stephen McLaughlin won the Grammy for Best Engineered Album (Non-Classical) for 'Wildflowers', which also garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album.

Petty is known as a staunch guardian of his creative control and artistic freedom. In 1979, he was dragged into a legal dispute when ABC Records was sold to MCA Records. He refused to be transferred to another record label without his consent. In May of 1979, he filed for bankruptcy and was signed to the new MCA subsidiary Backstreet Records. In early 1981, the upcoming Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers album, which would become 'Hard Promises', was slated to be the next MCA release with the new list price of $9.98, following Steely Dan's 'Gaucho' and the Olivia Newton-John/Electric Light Orchestra 'Xanadu' soundtrack. This so-called "superstar pricing" was $1.00 more than the usual list price of $8.98. Petty voiced his objections to the price hike in the press and the issue became a popular cause among music fans. Non-delivery of the album and naming it 'Eight Ninety-Eight' were considered, but eventually MCA decided against the price increase.