Bob Buziak

Bob Buziak died on Monday 12 October 2026, aged 83, after a long illness, HITS reported on 14 October 2026. Variety also reported his death. No specific cause, place of death or funeral arrangements were made public in the first reports.

Bob Buziak, born Robert Buziak, began his working life in the motor industry rather than in music. According to his own company biography, he spent six years in the styling division of the Ford Motor Company and attended Ford's Automotive School of Design at the University of Michigan, earning qualifications in engineering and design.

In 1968 he left Ford to enter the music business, a move HITS described in its obituary as leaving a position in Ford's styling division for the record industry.

Buziak learned the record business from the ground up, working in distribution and promotion for companies in Detroit and San Francisco. He then moved to Los Angeles to join Capitol/EMI Music, where he held senior national management positions in promotion and in artists and repertoire, working with the worldwide EMI group.

He left Capitol to join Arista Records, where he ran West Coast operations and was later promoted to managing director in the United Kingdom, a post his biography describes as UK and European managing director. On returning to the United States in 1978 he built a group of management, production and publishing companies. By his own account Buziak Inc. handled the careers of 25 clients who produced and wrote music for leading artists of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1986 Elliot Goldman, then head of RCA Records and of the Bertelsmann Music Group, hired Buziak as president of RCA Records with a mandate to rebuild the label. RCA was being passed from RCA Corporation to General Electric and then to Bertelsmann, and Buziak later told the Los Angeles Times that the label had become a small, uncompetitive appendage that had to take back $25 million of unsold records in his first year. He cut the pop roster from about 40 artists to 11, keeping Bruce Hornsby and the Range, whose 1986 debut The Way It Is sold more than three million copies, and signed marketing and distribution deals with the London label Beggars Banquet and with Jive Records, whose roster included Schooly D, Kool Moe Dee and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

The Dirty Dancing soundtrack, released in July 1987, transformed the label's finances. The talent scout Bob Feiden brought the script to Buziak, who knew people at Vestron Pictures and moved quickly to make the deal. The album, made for about $200,000, reached number one on the Billboard chart and sold 15.6 million copies; its song (I've Had) The Time of My Life by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy. The follow up, More Dirty Dancing, sold 5.6 million copies. RCA reported the most profitable year in its history, with United States gross revenue of $236 million for the year to July 1988, and also released hit albums by Eurythmics and broke new artists including Rick Astley, Lita Ford and Love and Rockets.

In August 1990 BMG announced that Buziak had stepped down by mutual agreement and that Joseph Galante would succeed him. He then served as president of Sony's TriStar Music Group and as president and chief operating officer of Chameleon Entertainment, a joint venture with Time Warner and Elektra Entertainment.

In late 1995 he formed Buziak and Company LLC, a consultancy that worked with telecom, cable, media and internet clients, among them AT&T, Cablevision, TCI, Liberty Media and Nielsen Media Research. As a board member and consultant he played an active role in the development and sale of Paradigm Music Entertainment to Liberty Media. He spent his later years as a board member or adviser to new media, gaming and internet companies.

Buziak kept his private life largely out of the press, and reports of his death did not give details of his family. Colleagues remembered him chiefly for his work in reviving RCA Records.

Buziak is remembered as the executive who brought RCA Records, the label of Elvis Presley, back to commercial relevance in the late 1980s. A rival executive told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that he had taken a company living off Elvis and turned it into a contender.

The Dirty Dancing soundtrack he secured became one of the best selling albums of its era, and his decision to open RCA to alternative and rap music through Beggars Banquet and Jive helped bring artists such as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince to a major label audience.