Across a six-decade career in the music industry, Mr. Stein flitted between genres and continents, always searching for the next big sound. “What I really am,” he once said, “is an extremist,” the kind of music-industry fanatic happy to spend $8,000 to book a last-minute Concorde flight to London to hear a hot new band called Depeche Mode. Upon his arrival, he found “four teenagers poking synths in a dump in the English suburbs” and signed them to a record deal.
Whatever the genre, all of the musicians on his roster seemed to share at least one quality. “They all had an edge,” Ice-T said in 2005 while inducting Mr. Stein intoMr. Stein’s biggest commercial success was the 1982 signing of a struggling singer who went by a single name, Madonna, and had recorded a demo track calledHe was in a New York City hospital, recovering from a heart infection with penicillin dripping through his body, when he first heard the song on his Sony Walkman.
May he rest in Peace
Rest in Paradise SeymourStein
He was Madonna's mentor and benefactor