After Clive Davis, the suits took over. They’ve never given them back.

The record men are gone. The algorithms took their desks. Nobody wrote a song about that.

Clive Davis with Aretha Franklin.

He came to music through a loophole. A Brooklyn orphan who put himself through NYU and Harvard Law on scholarships he couldn’t afford to lose, Clive Davis arrived at Columbia Records as a corporate lawyer and left, six years later, as the most important record executive in America.

What happened in between was Monterey, 1967 — a single weekend in San Francisco where Davis watched Janis Joplin perform with Big Brother and the Holding Company and understood, in the space of one extraordinary set, that the world had changed and he needed to change with it. He went back to New York and signed her.

“I accidentally discovered I had a totally unexpected and unexplained gift,” he once said. “Ears.”

Davis died this week, aged 94, and with him goes something the industry has been quietly losing for 30 years: the idea that the person behind the desk can matter as much as the artist in front of the microphone.

It sounds like an odd thing to miss. But there was a period — roughly from the mid-50s to the end of the 90s — when the great record executives were genuine cultural figures, with personalities as legible as any act on their roster.

Berry Gordy built Motown from an $800 loan, wrote hit songs himself, directed his artists’ wardrobes and choreography, and turned a Detroit record label into the most successful Black-owned business in America. Ahmet Ertegun co-founded Atlantic Records and spent five decades championing rhythm and blues with the instincts of a musician rather than a businessman — because he was one. Chris Blackwell founded Island Records in Jamaica in 1959, sold reggae records from the boot of his car when he moved to Britain, and eventually introduced Bob Marley to the world. Even Richard Branson, whose interest in music was inseparable from his interest in everything else, built his behemoth on the back of signing a 19-year-old who wanted to make an album with no vocals. His name was Mike Oldfield. Then, of course there was Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who more or less helped invent rock ’n’ roll when he took a chance on a shy, well-mannered kid named, of all things, Elvis Presley.

These were recognisable individuals. Their taste was the label’s identity. The artists who signed with them knew who they were signing with.

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Now ask yourself who runs Republic Records? Atlantic? Warner?

The answer, not that you’re interested, is Jim Roppo, Elliot Grainge, Aaron Bay-Schuck — names that mean nothing outside the industry and not always much within it. Columbia sits inside a structure overseen by Rob Stringer. Capitol operates under Tom March. These are capable executives managing very large and very complex businesses. They are not cultural figures. Nobody is writing a song about them. But Aerosmith wrote a song about Davis [No Surprize] because, well, he was Clive Davis!

There is an exception, however. There always is. Rick Rubin, who co-founded Def Jam in a New York dormitory room in 1984, helped popularise hip hop through early sessions with LL Cool J, Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, and then performed one of the more remarkable left turns in music history by reviving Johnny Cash’s career through a series of stripped-back acoustic recordings that made the rest of the industry feel slightly embarrassed about everything it had been doing. Rubin has remained a genuine public personality across four decades. But Rubin is a producer first. His fame derives from being in the room where the music was made, not from the decisions taken in the room down the hall.

This question of credit is worth pausing on, because it sits at the heart of how the great executives built their reputations — and how those reputations occasionally outgrew the facts. Davis’s 1975 memoir claimed sole credit for the success of the artists he had worked with, a position his former colleagues received with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Bruce Springsteen, for example, was signed to Columbia not by Davis but by John Hammond, the talent scout who had also brought Bob Dylan to the label a decade earlier. Pink Floyd signed with EMI; Davis secured the rights to distribute their music outside Europe, which is a meaningful thing to have done, but a different thing from discovery. Billy Joel recorded Cold Spring Harbor for Family Productions before Columbia issued it. The narrative of the all-seeing executive who plucked genius from obscurity is almost always more complicated in the telling than in the original transaction.

Davis with a young Whitney Houston.

None of which diminishes what Davis actually did, which was considerable. The instinct that took him to Monterey and back to New York with Joplin in tow was real. The ear that heard Whitney Houston at 19 and understood immediately what she could become was real. The tenacity that rebuilt a career after being fired from Columbia in 1973 — exonerated of most charges, guilty on one count of tax evasion, forced to start again — and produced Arista Records, one of the defining labels of the next quarter century, was entirely real.

Carlos Santana once described him as “a little child with a big heart and big ears”. Aretha Franklin called him “the greatest record man of all time”.

The reasons Clive Davis and his ilk are no longer possible are structural as much as personal. Three corporate behemoths now control most of recorded music, and the label heads who operate within them are divisional managers rather than creative visionaries. Taste is mediated by data. Streaming has shifted power away from the gatekeeper and toward the algorithm, which has no personality and cannot be charmed, argued with, or fired.

Davis threw his annual Grammy party every year until the end. Algorithms don’t throw parties.