R.I.P.: Seymour Stein, Record Industry Giant Who Signed Madonna

Seymour Stein (1943-2023)

Seymour Stein, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member who was the co-founder of Sire Records, the former vice president at Warner Bros. Records has died.

His daughter, filmmaker Mandy Stein, told The Hollywood Reporter her father died Sunday in Los Angeles from cancer.  He was 80-years of age, reports Billboard.

Stein signed such music legends as Madonna and The Ramones at Sire. But when he was just a teenager, he began working as an assistant to Tommy Noonan, then head of charts at Billboard, where Stein sat in on meetings to decide which new records to review and helped to compile the then just-launched Hot 100.

“I was just 16, working at Billboard after school. From the time I was 9 years old, I knew I wanted to be in the music buseinss,” he said in an interview published in 2015.

Stein’s tenure at Billboard lasted until 1961, and then he took his first label job, working for Syd Nathan and King Records in Cincinnati before moving back to New York with a stint at Red Bird Records, owned and run by George Goldner and the songwriting/production team of Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber.

Stein co-founded Sire with Richard Gottehrer in 1967 as an independent record label, but joined forces with Warner nine years later, in 1976. Stein once told Billboard the first artist he signed was “Steven Tallarico, who later became Steve Tyler from Aerosmith. He was in a group called Chain Reaction” at the time.

The legendary roster at Sire included Madonna, The Ramones, The Smiths, Talking Heads, The Pretenders, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Ice-T and many, many more.

Of first bringing Madonna to Sire, Stein said, “I signed her because I believed in Mark Kamins, who I thought was the greatest DJ, and he wanted to be a producer. So I gave him some money to bring me an artist and the third or fourth thing he brought me was Madonna. And yes, I was very involved in the beginning. Then I realized, ‘This woman is smarter than all of us. Just get out of her way.'”

In a business fixated on hits, Mr. Stein was a walking encyclopedia of 20th-century pop, and more. He could rattle off the lyrics, chart positions and B-sides of seemingly any notable record going back to the 1940s, and lovingly sing their hooks in a nasal whine. A champion of punk rock in the 1970s, he would also tear up over “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem.

“He knows all the lyrics to every song you’ve ever heard,” Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders once said.
In 2005, Stein was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the lifetime-achievement category.