Ray Caviano

Raymond Francis Caviano, known throughout the music industry as Ray Caviano, was a New York native promoter, label founder and dance-music executive whose work helped define how major labels sold disco and club records. Across more than five decades he moved from early jobs at Rolling Stone and London Records to Henry Stone's TK Records, then to Warner Bros., where he founded the Warner-backed RFC Records imprint named for his initials. Colleagues remembered him as a booth-level operator who treated club DJs as partners in breaking hits, and as a man whose career took in both extraordinary commercial success and a long, public struggle with addiction before a later return to promotion and recovery work.

Raised in Manhattan, Caviano described himself as a Motown-loving high-school dropout who found his vocation on the dance floor. At TK he ran disco promotion and helped push records by KC and the Sunshine Band, T-Connection, Peter Brown, Vicki Sue Robinson, Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band and Village People. Warner Bros. recruited him to lead its dance efforts; in 1979 RFC launched with a Studio 54 party and quickly scored with Gino Soccio's Dancer and Change's The Glow of Love, which introduced many listeners to a then little-known Luther Vandross. Caviano's teams also worked club-side campaigns for Warner and Atlantic artists including Rod Stewart's Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, the Doobie Brothers' What a Fool Believes, Prince's I Wanna Be Your Lover and Laura Branigan's Gloria. Billboard recognised him as a dance promotion standout of the late 1970s.

After Warner, he continued RFC with Quality in Canada and later with Atlantic, releasing or promoting club staples that ranged from Karen Silver and Jimmy Ross to the Detroit proto-techno classic Sharevari by A Number of Names, and helping Yoko Ono's Walking on Thin Ice reach dancers after John Lennon's murder. The same nightlife that made him indispensable also nearly destroyed him. By the mid-1980s the Village Voice and UPI reported that the so-called kingpin of disco had fallen into a severe heroin and cocaine habit, forgery and theft, and prison time at Taconic Correctional Facility. His twin brother Robert, a booking agent linked to Grace Jones and others, died of AIDS-related illness in 1992; for years some friends thought Ray himself was gone.

Caviano eventually rebuilt his life as an addictions specialist and, years sober, returned to music under the RFC name, working promotion, marketing and consulting into 2026. In Red Bull Music Academy interviews he framed his story around the beauty and integrity of a good song and around helping the next person in trouble the way he once helped a DJ find the right intro. SoulTracks and CelebrityAccess reported his unexpected death around 29 September 2026; tributes from Larry Flick, John Luongo and others called him a golden-eared champion of dance music. He was about seventy-five or seventy-six. Cause of death was not publicly disclosed.