Seymour Stein, record label boss who signed Madonna and top alternative acts, dead at 80

Seymour Stein, the brash, prescient and wildly successful founder of Sire Records who helped launch the careers of Madonna, the Talking Heads and others, died on Sunday at the age of 80.

Stein, who helped found the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation and was inducted into the Rock Hall in 2005, died of cancer in Los Angeles, according to a statement from his family.

Born in 1942, Stein was a New York City native who as a teenager worked summers at Cincinnati-based King Records, James Brown’s label, and by his mid-20s had founded Sire Productions with Richard Gottehrer, later Sire Records.

Obsessed with the Billboard charts from an early age, he was known for his deep knowledge and appreciation of music and would prove an astute judge of talent during the New Wave era of the 1970s, a term he helped popularize, signing recording contracts with Talking Heads, the Ramones and the Pretenders.

“Seymour’s taste in music was always a few years ahead of everyone else’s,” Talking Heads manager Gary Kurfirst told the Rock Hall at Stein’s induction.

Enter Madonna from the hospital bed

The most profitable discovery happened in the early 1980s, when he heard a demo recording of the famous singer-dancer from a downtown New York club, Madonna.

“I like Madonna’s voice, I like her taste, and I like the name Madonna. I like everything and play it again,” he wrote in his memoirs. The Siren’s Song, published in 2018, the same year he retired. Stein was hospitalized with a heart infection when he first found out about Madonna, but was so eager to meet her that he brought her to his room.

“They are all sold in cheap punky gear, club kids who look absurd in the heart ward,” he wrote. “He wasn’t even interested in hearing me explain how much I liked his demo.

Sire’s artists also included Ice T, the Replacements, British alternative acts like the Smiths, Depeche Mode, the Charlatans, and Echo and the Bunnymen, along with the more established Lou Reed and Brian Wilson, who recorded with Sire later in his career.

Stein was briefly married to record promoter and real estate executive Linda Adler, with whom he had two children: filmmaker Mandy Stein and Samantha Lee Jacobs, who died of brain cancer in 2013.

Stein and his wife divorced in the 1970s, and years later he came out as gay.

“I am beyond grateful for every minute my family spent with him, and the music he brought to the world touched so many people in such a positive way,” Mandy Stein said in a statement Sunday.