On a June weekend in 1967, a 35-year-old lawyer stood in the crowd at the Monterey International Pop Festival and felt his body react before his mind could catch up. Watching Janis Joplin front Big Brother and the Holding Company, Clive Davis later recalled, “My spine tingled, my arms vibrated.” He had arrived at the California fairgrounds as the newly installed president of Columbia Records, a label that had largely resisted rock ’n’ roll. He left having signed Joplin that night, convinced that the counterculture he had just witnessed was not a fad but the future of popular music. That moment of physical recognition — a trained negotiator trusting his viscera — became the founding myth of a career that would span more than half a century and touch nearly every major current in American sound.

Davis died on Monday at his Manhattan apartment, aged 94, his family confirmed. He had been hospitalised in late May with a respiratory infection and released days earlier. The statement issued by his children described a figure whose “vision, instincts, and relentless pursuit of excellence shaped the soundtrack of countless lives.” It was an unusually literal claim. Over six decades, the Brooklyn-born Davis, orphaned in his teens and put through New York University and Harvard Law School on scholarships, moved from Columbia’s legal department to its presidency, then founded Arista Records in 1974 and later J Records, serving until his final years as chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment. The roster of artists he discovered, mentored or revitalised reads like a shorthand history of modern pop: Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Earth, Wind & Fire, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys, Santana, Patti Smith, the Notorious B.I.G., and dozens more.

What distinguished Davis from other record men was not merely the breadth of his signings but a particular kind of attention. He spoke of a hit song as a “three-legged stool” requiring the right composition, performance and production, and he was willing to fight for each leg. When producer David Foster opposed the 40-second a cappella intro on Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You,” Davis insisted it stay; the recording became one of the best-selling singles in history. He could also hear when a veteran needed a new frame. In 1999 he conceived the album “Supernatural,” pairing Carlos Santana with younger vocalists, and watched it win eight Grammys. He persuaded Rod Stewart to set aside rock for the standards of the “Great American Songbook,” generating a multi-platinum franchise. His ear, colleagues said, was not infallible — he passed on Meat Loaf — but it was unusually attuned to the intersection of artistic singularity and mass appetite.

Tributes from the artists he shaped were swift and personal. Bruce Springsteen, whom Davis signed at 22 and nudged to write the radio-friendly “Blinded by the Light,” posted that Davis “treated me with the same respect and kindness as a 22-year-old nobody as he did after all my success.” Patti Smith thanked him for “a half century of your love and support.” Barry Manilow, whose “Mandy” gave Arista its first number one, described a fifty-year working relationship that “never was business. It was family.” Michael Sticka, president of the Grammy Museum — whose intimate performance space bears Davis’s name — told the Los Angeles Times that a career like his is unlikely to be replicated in an era when artists break on social media before executives hear them. Davis’s annual pre-Grammy gala, held every year since 1976, had become the industry’s most coveted invitation, a room where pop, politics and technology mingled; on the night Whitney Houston died in 2012, he chose not to cancel it, gathering a grieving industry in what one attendee called a “beautiful yet traumatic sign of resilience.”

Davis himself, even past 90, remained convinced that the core of his work was not commerce but a human constant. “Music is an indispensable ingredient in human life,” he said in 2016. “No matter what technological revolution is taking place, it must be understood that music will not become obsolete. Human beings need music.” The man who entered the business knowing nothing about it, and who later came to be called “the man with the golden ear,” spent his final years still searching for the next voice that would make his spine tingle.