Revered Music Executive, Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame Inductee Seymour Stein Dies At 80

Revered music executive, Sire Records founder Seymour Stein and former VP of Warner Brothers, died yesterday (2) at the age of 80, after a long battle with cancer. Hailed far and wide as a “music man” of the old A&R school, he signed such artists as Madonna, the Pretenders, the Ramones, and Talking Heads, and was one of the key tastemakers of the punk and new wave era.

Born on April 18, 1940 in New York, Stein worked as a teenager for Billboard magazine and became a devotee of pop music from the rock’n’roll era onwards. He was part of the editorial team that introduced the magazine’s flagship Hot 100 chart in 1958. Stein spent two years in the early 1960s working at King Records, synonymous with James Brown, and, still in his mid-20s, formed Sire Records in 1966 with producer-writer Richard Gottehrer.

The label was an early US partner of Blue Horizon, which released Fleetwood Mac’s first material, and had its first American hit with “Hocus Pocus” by Dutch progressive rock band Focus. Sire later rose to prominence in the new wave era as he signed the Ramones and Talking Heads and as a force in cutting edge pop, notably with its first US No.1, M’s “Pop Muzik,” and when he signed Madonna in 1982.

Sire was also responsible for the US emergence of such British as the Smiths, Depeche More, Echo and the Bunnymen, Everything But The Girl, Ride, and My Bloody Valentine. As Stein’s personal stature rose, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which he had helped to create, in 2005 and, as an elder statesman renowned not only for his musical taste but his flamboyant personality, an Icon Award from Billboard in 2012.

Stein left the Warner Music group, after 42 years, in 2018, the year he published his memoir, Siren Song: My Life in Music. In it, he wrote: “Being liked was not my goal in life,” Mr. Stein wrote. “My business was turning great music into hit records.”