Clive Davis, the record executive whose instinct for a hit and faith in raw talent helped shape American popular music for more than half a century, died on June 22, 2026, at his home in Manhattan. He was 94. The label chief who guided Columbia Records, founded Arista Records and later J Records, and who discovered or championed an extraordinary procession of stars, from Janis Joplin to Whitney Houston to Alicia Keys, passed away peacefully surrounded by his family, according to Variety.

He was born Clive Jay Davis on April 4, 1932, in Brooklyn, New York. A gifted student, he attended New York University on a full scholarship and graduated magna cum laude before going on to Harvard Law School, where he earned his degree in 1956. He began his professional life as a lawyer, and it was the law, not music, that first carried him into the recording industry. In 1960 he joined Columbia Records as assistant counsel, and within a few years his sharp judgment and ambition had lifted him into the executive ranks. In 1967 he was named president of the label.

What happened next became part of music industry legend. That June, Davis attended the Monterey Pop Festival and saw the cultural ground shifting beneath him. He returned determined to move the staid, tradition-bound Columbia into the new world of rock. He signed Janis Joplin's group Big Brother and the Holding Company, brought Santana aboard, and over the following years helped build a roster that included Blood Sweat and Tears, Chicago, Billy Joel and a young songwriter from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen. Davis had a rare gift for hearing a future star in an unfinished performance, and he spent the rest of his life trusting that ear.

In 1974 he founded Arista Records, the label that would define his middle career. He gave it an early number one with Barry Manilow's 'Mandy' and assembled a roster that ranged across pop, rock, soul and gospel, from Patti Smith and Aretha Franklin to Kenny G, TLC and Toni Braxton. His most storied discovery came in 1983, when he watched a young singer named Whitney Houston perform at a New York club while opening for her cousin Dionne Warwick. He would call her 'the greatest contemporary singer of all time,' as Rolling Stone recounted, and under his guidance she delivered seven consecutive number one singles and became one of the best-selling artists of her era.

Davis never settled into the role of elder statesman content to coast on past success. In 1999 he guided Santana's 'Supernatural' to the top of the charts, a comeback album that went on to win nine Grammy Awards. The following year he founded J Records, and there he discovered Alicia Keys, whose debut 'Songs in A Minor' became a multi-platinum sensation and a Grammy juggernaut in its own right. He also helped launch Leona Lewis and reignited Rod Stewart's recording career. Few executives in any field have remained at the very top of their game across so many decades and so many shifts in popular taste.

His peers marveled at that longevity. 'He's the ultimate long-term player,' the manager Jon Landau said of him. 'I do not think you'll see that happen again.' Santana, in his own tribute, captured the boyish enthusiasm that drove Davis, saying that if he were to draw a picture of him, 'it would be as a little child with a big heart and big ears.' Bruce Springsteen, recalling the moment that set his career in motion, said simply, 'At 22 years old, he changed my life when he signed me to Columbia Records,' according to Rolling Stone.

Davis collected nearly every honor the industry could bestow. He won multiple Grammy Awards for albums he shepherded, including Santana's 'Supernatural,' Kelly Clarkson's 'Breakaway' and Jennifer Hudson's self-titled debut, and in 2000 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer, as CNN reported. Beyond the awards, he gave the business an enduring social ritual in his annual Pre-Grammy Gala, a Grammy Week gathering that became one of the most coveted invitations in entertainment, and an institution of higher learning in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, which he founded at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2003 to train the next generation. In 2013 he told his own story in the memoir 'The Soundtrack of My Life.'

He was survived by three sons, Fred, Doug and Mitchell, and a daughter, Lauren, several of whom built their own careers in music and entertainment. Doug, a Grammy-winning producer and entertainment attorney, long helped produce the gala that bore his father's name.

Clive Davis leaves behind a catalog of music that became the soundtrack of millions of lives, and a model of what a record executive could be at his best: not merely a businessman, but a believer in artists. He measured success in voices the world might never have heard without him, and in the careers he nurtured from first audition to lasting stardom. The songs he helped bring into being will go on playing long after the man who first heard their promise has gone quiet, and that may be the truest measure of the legacy he built.