Music mogul Seymour Stein who signed Madonna for $15,000 dead aged 80

3 April 2023

Music mogul Seymour Stein – famed for signing Madonna for $15,000 as he lay in a hospital bed – has died aged 80.

Music mogul Seymour Stein – famed for signing Madonna for $15,000 as he lay in a hospital bed – has died aged 80

The groundbreaking and brash Sire Records founder, who also propelled

Steve Tyler and Talking Heads to fame and launched the careers of Depeche Mode, The Ramones and The Cure among a huge list of other acts, passed away from cancer in Los Angeles on Sunday (02.04.23) according to his family.

His daughter Mandy Stein confirmed the news in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, saying: “He never said, ‘I discovered,’ because he really believed that good music would be found, and he was a collaborative person and gave credit to everyone that was a part of his team.

“But I think of all the music and artists that he signed and jumped on planes and went to obscure (places)… all these amazing stories of going at Yonkers to hear Steven Tyler before he was Steven Tyler, and he would go anywhere to hear great music, and he was so passionate and really would not stop if he believed in an artist.”

Mandy also hailed her dad as a “doting grandfather” and the “ultimate music man”, who left her amazed with his knowledge of music when she started making documentaries.

Seymour, who helped found the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation and was inducted in 2005.

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 co-founded Sire Productions, soon to become Sire Records.

His most famous discovery was in the early 1980s, when he heard a demo tape of a then-little known singer Madonna.

He said in his 2018 ‘Siren Song’ memoir about hearing her first efforts through his Sony Walkman and feeling so excited it was like “penicillin dripped into” his heart: “I liked Madonna’s voice, I liked the feel, and I liked the name Madonna. I liked it all and played it again.”

Seymour also told in the book how he signed Madonna for $15,000 from his hospital bed as he waited to have open-heart surgery in New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital in 1982.

He said: “She was all dolled up in cheap punky gear, the kind of club kid who looked absurdly out of place in a cardiac ward.

“She wasn’t even interested in hearing me explain how much I liked her demo. ‘The thing to do now,’ she said, ‘is sign me to a record deal.’”

He added: “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 realised, ‘This woman is smarter than all of us. Just get out of her way.’”

When he was a teenager, Seymour started working as an assistant to Tommy Noonan, then head of charts at Billboard, where the future music executive sat in on meetings to decide which new records to review and helped to compile the then just-launched Hot 100.

He took his first label job in the 1960s, working for Syd Nathan and King Records in Cincinnati before moving back to New York with a stint at Red Bird Records.

Seymour then co-founded Sire with Richard Gottehrer in 1967 as an independent record label, and told ‘Billboard’ about the first artist he signed being “Steven Tallarico, who later became Steve Tyler from Aerosmith”.

He had a brief marriage to record promoter and real estate executive Linda Adler – who died in 2007 aged 62 – with whom he had two children, filmmaker Mandy Stein and Samantha Lee Jacobs, who died of brain cancer in 2013.

In 2012, he was the first recipient of Billboard‘s Icon Award, and four years later took home the Richmond Hitmaker Award at the Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony.