Music mogul Seymour Stein, who worked at Cincinnati's King Records as a teen, dead at 80

Seymour Stein, the music industry giant who got his start at Cincinnati-based King Records, died from cancer Sunday, his family said. He was 80 years old.

Stein interned at King Records, James Brown's record label, as a teenager during the summers of 1957 and 1958. In 1961, he moved to Cincinnati from New York and worked for the label for two years. By his mid-20s, he and record producer Richard Gottehrer co-founded Sire Productions, which would later become Sire Records.

Through Sire Records, Stein signed world famous acts like Madonna, Ice-T and The Ramones, as well as Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, The Smiths and The Cure. Stein is credited with popularizing the new wave music genre and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which he helped establish, in 2005.

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Stein was briefly married to music manager and real estate executive Linda Adler, who was killed in 2007. The couple divorced in the late '70s and Stein later revealed he was gay. He and Adler shared two daughters: filmmaker Mandy Stein and Samantha Lee Jacobs, who died of brain cancer in 2013.

“I am beyond grateful for every minute our family spent with him, and that the music he brought to the world impacted so many people’s lives in a positive way,” Mandy said in a statement, per AP.