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It has been a busy few weeks to say the least. As you know, if you've been listening to the show, we recently welcomed a new addition to the family, a new baby girl. Everyone is happy, everyone is healthy and recovering, still getting sleep when we can. But because of that we did take a brief pause. But we're back and we have a bunch of new and exciting episodes coming up soon. But we did want to take some time out for this particular episode, which is all about Clive Davis, my relationship, my interaction with him and some things about him that I think may get overlooked. So let's get into it. I'm Dan runcy. Welcome to Trapital. On June 22, 2026, Clive Davis passed away at 94 years old. I've been reaching out to a bunch since he passed from friends and colleagues at Listen to trapital and other media publications across the world. Because this conversation that Clive and I had on Trapital that we released in April was one of the last interviews that he had with anyone before he passed. His actual last interview, to my knowledge, was in May of 2026. That was a sit down conversation at the Amplify Music Summit with his son Fred, who is an investment banker at the Rain Group, which I do think is truly fitting that that was the last conversation that he had. But since I did spend some time with Clive leading up to and both after our conversation as well, I thought it'd be a great opportunity to share a few thoughts, not just on my interactions, but also on Clive himself and some of the things about Clive and his impact that I do think get overlooked that we're going to dig into today. But my experience with Clyde actually dates back to October 2024, the week after our first ever Trapital Summit. Clive was hosting an intimate dinner for around 30 industry executives, specifically people that he had not had an opportunity to meet yet to give them an opportunity to connect, meet with him and have a truly off the record conversation. I was grateful for the invite, glad to be invited, but unfortunately a few days before the event, my invite was rescinded. Around this same time was when a bunch of the fallout with the Diddy situation was happening and Clive was getting a lot of questions, some fair, some unfair, about his involvement, his relationship there, and he made a decision that he rescinded not just my invite, but anyone that was involved with press, media, reporters and others. I had made the case to the person that invited me, hey, I'm not a trade publication, I don't chase scoops. But I did have a platform and at the time we did do an episode about Clive. More on that in a bit. And given that I'm grateful that I'm a voice that people do follow and pay attention to and have influence in the space, that was enough for him to have some caution and keep this to a truly off the record conversation with no one that had an audience or platform or any other reporters there. Now if we fast forward to the following summer, summer 2025, I had had a conversation with Fred Davis, he's one of our partners at the Rain Group, to help with our 2025 Trapital Summit. So we're having one of our normal check ins and then at the end of it he said, hey, I want to talk to you about something on a completely different topic. You had done a conversation, an interview breakdown, analyzing my dad's career and I don't know if you know this, but he sat down, watched the entire thing and took notes. And when he told me this, I was not expecting to hear that. To be clear, I'm aware that most of the people that get some type of analysis or coverage or breakdowns in trapital, it probably reaches them one way or another. Whether they directly subscribe to the newsletter, they listen to the podcast, someone they know forwarded to them, they this stuff travels around quite a bit. But for someone at Clive's age, 90 or at that point 92 years old, to sit down and watch the entire thing wasn't what I expected. For instance, we've done breakdowns on Berry Gordy and Motown. Barry Gordy is around the same age as Clive Davis. If someone told me that Barry Gordy had sat down and listened to any of the breakdowns we had on Motown, I probably wouldn't believe it either. But all that to say Fred and I talked about it. We talked about it again at the dinner we had hosted before our Trapital Summit for 2025. He said, oh this will great opportunity, you should talk to his team. So Fred's son Charlie, who is also the co founder of the tech company Jenny, he connected me with Clive's team at DKC News and we worked together to help make this all happen. So that fall 2025, Clive and I had an initial conversation, wanted to get to know me since that didn't happen at that dinner in 2024, but getting a chance to actually connect, talk a bit more, hear some of his thoughts on some of the topics that he hadn't really got into, that would be interesting. I shared the ones that I did and he had given me A heads up that Barack Obama would be introducing him at his upcoming pre Grammy gala. So I didn't know that one was coming. So after that first conversation of Break the Ice, we scheduled the conversation. We had it at the end of March in Beverly Hills at his bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel. For any of you that have been in the Beverly Hills Hotel, it truly is a CNBC place, a distinct artifact of everything that Hollywood and entertainment was. And also where it's going, the Polo Lounge especially, there's always different people you may be rubbing shoulders with there. And when I was waiting for Clive outside of his bungalow, Justin Bieber literally walked by me on his way to the elevator that was right around the corner. And this was just a week or two before he was about to headline Coachella. Justin Bieber also, by the way, much shorter in person. I don't know who says that he was five nine or five' ten, but I think he may be inflating his height a little bit, the same way that some of these NBA players may be doing the same. But again, the preparation, the focus on the details still, when we recorded the conversation, it was just before he turned 93 and then turned 94 a couple weeks after. Truly was impressive and it says a lot. And he kept that true as well in the follow up conversation that we had. I rarely ever do follow up conversations with people that we interview, but I knew the moment. I knew this was definitely an opportunity to dig a bit deeper and get to talk about a few other topics that can easily just go through when you're recording an hour plus long conversation with someone that has had a storied career as Clive. We could have had a full conversation about his time solely at Columbia, his time solely at Arista, and then his time from J Records and RCA and Sony BMG and that whole part of his career. That's how detailed and that's how impactful his career is. But you don't need to hear me say that. You probably already know that. If you're listening to this episode from my vantage point, having had the conversations with him and done the research, I think there's the version of Clive that often gets the most discussed and. And then there's the overlooked part. We've often heard the Columbia stories. That era Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, that's been well documented. Then you have the Arista time frame, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, LaFace, Bad Boy, any of those partnerships, the pre Grammy gala, and truly honing in on Whitney being the defining chapter of his career for many people, but the part that stands out to me, and I'm not just saying this to be contrarian or to make good content, I truly believe that the most overlooked and arguably the most impressive part of Clive's career is that stretch from 1999 to 2007, 2008. Because that's the time where Clive gets pushed out of Arista. And if he never did anything after that point, he could have been a legend still. Still a legacy figure that did everything that I talked about before. But you have his work with Santana on that Supernatural album sweeps the Grammys. Smooth is truly an unavoidable song. So 1999, he has the comeback with Santana. The Supernatural album is huge. It is the classic late career commercial revival story for Santana, but also for Clive Davis. The song in the album sweeps the Grammys. Smooth is literally unavoidable. But. But then, even though he gets pushed out of Arista, Louisiana, Reid ends up taking over for him. He then negotiates to then start J Records to stay under the BMG umbrella. And he is starting this when he's 70 years old and very close to it. Imagine the people that run the record labels in the major music industry now, like Lucy and Grange or Rob Stringer, who are in their 60s. Think about them four, five, six years from now, then having one of the most successful stretches of their career. That's what we're talking about. And that's Alicia Keys, that's Luther Vandross, and that's also him being able to build up J Records to the point where he eventually then oversees rca, J Records, Arista, because they bring it back under him. And at this point, Clive is still making tens of millions of dollars per year because of both the ownership stakes that he had in the companies that he was starting, but also just the continued purview that he has in the industry. Foreign let's take a break for our chart metric stat of the week. I was eager to see which songs that were released under Clive Davis record labels have performed the best in the streaming era. Which of his songs have had the most longevity and impact today? The top three surprised me, though they may surprise you too. Number three is Whitney Houston's 1987 hit song I Want to Dance With Somebody, which currently has 1.7 billion streams on Spotify. Two Maroon 5's this Love, released in 2004 under Clive's J Records. Again, that era, that's the underrated era that I'm talking about. That song has 1.8 billion streams but one she will be loved by Maroon 5 has 2.1 billion streams. Again, that J Records era from Clive gets overlooked smash hits. And again, it's why I think it's one of the underrated eras of his career. And truly a song and an album, songs about Jane overall, that continues to live on. Let's get back to the episode I said this in the episode that we recorded, and I'll say it here again. The Comebacks. The Comeback kid, whether it's the artist that he worked with that he was able to help have these late career revivals with like Carlos Santana and Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross. What he was able to do there was impressive, but also how he did it with his own career too. Again, could have been a legend after everything with Columbia, could have been a legend after everything with Columbia and Arista. But to then have this next career arc and truly be arguably even more successful. He reminds me of Pat Riley. Pat Riley, probably mostly known for his success with the Showtime lakers in the 80s the and my folks in the Tri State area in New York love those 90s Knicks teams that he was part of. But you could argue that the Miami Heat stretch of Pat Riley's career is arguably the most impressive. Three championships, seven NBA Finals appearances, and this was a situation where he was able to have more ownership. The head coach that he has in place is the longest tenured head coach in the NBA with Eric Spoelstra. Heat culture is a thing that people talk about because of Pat Riley. And sure, there's some of that same maniac control that Pat Riley has about things about the classic story about LeBron and the Cookies and even some of the control narrative that there was about Clive Davis and how he was with him and his own artist himself. Right? There are some parallels there. The guy really is the Pat Riley of the music business and he just continues to show it again. And I think the Heat to J Records, RCA example, is the perfect reason why. But the one topic that we didn't get into was American Idol. Clive had had a relationship to not only be a guest judge on occasion, but also through RCA's partnership with American Idol. So the artist that won American Idol each of those early years automatically got a record deal and therefore were working closely with Clive Davis. The relationship between him and Kelly Clarkson has been well documented about their fallout and even some of the conflicting things that Clive had in his book the Soundtrack to Our Life and what Kelly Clarkson said in response to that, we're not going to get into all of that here, Clive went as far as to say in his book about Alicia Keys that you wouldn't find an artist like Alicia Keys on a show like that. Granted, he did also make digs at Kelly Clarkson when he said, I couldn't confirm one way or another whether I would have signed her if it wasn't part of this relationship, which is not the most flattering thing to hear. But it did stand out as an insight because Clive was calling out how, yes, these talent shows or these types of games like American Idol, they are more likely to get someone that could sing big vocals or do a recording of someone else really well. But that's very different from the artistry and the songwriting that can make someone stand out. And it's one of those things that, in hindsight, makes perfect sense. But for me at the time, someone that watched American Idol religiously, that was not something that I picked up on in the moment. I saw that Kelly Clarkson was obviously a success. Right. I know that since you've been gone, there was a lot of debate about Clive and Max Martin's involvement there. But now, as I reflect on Clive's analysis of why a lot of American Idol stars don't break through, it makes perfect sense. That was an insight I had at the moment. To be clear, I would watch the show and be like, okay, yo, Kelly Clarkson has her moment. Ruben stuttered, okay, we're next up. Fantasia, you got this. Even Taylor Hicks, who, personally, I wasn't the biggest fan of, I thought that he was going to have a successful career because people clearly voted for him. But it just goes to show that there clearly was a disconnect between someone being successful on a show like that and the actual artist being an underlying success there. But again, one of the reasons that I didn't get into that in the episode is because it felt more like a personal thing and not that. To be clear, my interest in American Idol being personal wasn't really personal. That show was rivaling NFL games for the amount of people that were watching that on a regular basis. My roommates and I in college would literally vote on American Idol. And I'll tell you, when Chris Daughttry got voted off that show, before you even got to the final four, we reacted like Buster Douglas had knocked out Mike Tyson. We couldn't believe that that was even happening. But again, didn't necessarily feel as key as some of the other things that Clive and I had gotten into that day. If there is a tie in, though, it does highlight a bit of that disconnect between the taste that an executive can have, especially the executive that's named Mr. Goldeneers himself, and the audience participation. I think a version of that today may be an artist that is blowing up on TikTok and has all these views and is really good at engineering content and getting in front and understanding how the algorithms work. And that being truly different from an artist that just doesn't do as much of that. But one thing that I did think a lot about was this. Clive clearly adapted across several eras of the music business, dating back to the 60s and 70s, all the way up until the mid and nearly late 2000s. Yes, he still had an executive role at Sony, but it wasn't the same level of focus, especially when streaming really took off. How would Clive have operated in the streaming era today, knowing all of the dynamics, all of the trade offs and just how different the type of executive profile looks? This is a different business, especially when several of these music companies are publicly traded entities. And that can change the incentives both for the artists they sign, how they sign those artists, what it's like for artists to break through versus others. There are so many different factors and it's a truly unanswerable question, but it was something that I did think a lot with this episode. But with all this, as I sit and reflect on Clive's life, his impact, the conversations that we had, or any of the analysis I've read that others have done, I think that people may often talk about his golden ears as the thing that stands out, but there's plenty of people that have golden ears. But when you compare that taste with the conviction, with the leverage and just being able to reinvent yourself, that's what makes Colombia, Arista J RCA and all those eras of his career have a true through line. And I think his comebacks prove time and time again that he had every reason to move on from this, but he still find a way to make it happen. And I'm interested to see who the next Clive Davis will be. Who are the people that can continue to make those moves and the influence as well. Rest in peace to Clive Davis really appreciated the conversations that we had and I hope that everyone that listened to our episode appreciated them as well. And I do hope that they pick up new insights or maybe even their own unique takeaways the same way that I did. And that is a wrap. Thank you again to Clive Davis. Thank you again to his family, his business partners, the DKC News and the entire team that helped make all of these conversations possible. Thank you again to our audio and video producers G and Eric for everything that you do to help make Trapital possible. Thank you to Roana on our team for everything that you do to help make Trapital itself run. But most importantly, thank you for listening. If there's one person you know that would really enjoy this episode breaking down Clive Davis career, remembering him, please send them a link to the episode. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow and if you have a few moments, leave a comment, leave a review that helps Trap Ital reach the right people. Thanks again. Talk to you next time.