## The Music Catalog Sale: $50 Million and What It Measures
In October 2021, Tina Turner sold the rights to her music catalog to BMG, the recorded music company. The sale was estimated at approximately $50 million.
A music catalog sale is the contemporary entertainment industry’s mechanism for valuing a body of work in a single transaction: the buyer acquires the rights to a lifetime of recordings and pays a lump sum based on the projected future value of those rights as commercial assets. The $50 million figure — an estimate, not a confirmed contract value — is one way of measuring what the name and the catalog had become.
In 1978, the divorce settlement gave Ike Turner the publishing companies and the recording studio and the real estate. Tina Turner kept the name and the songwriter royalties for songs she had written. In 2021, the person who had kept the name sold the catalog built under that name for an estimated $50 million.
The settlement’s asset distribution, from the perspective of 2021, is one of the most dramatic illustrations of how the immediate value of an asset and its long-term value can diverge.
## The Final Tour: Retirement in 2009
After the Twenty Four Seven Tour in 2000 — which grossed over $120 million and was the highest-grossing tour of that year — Tina Turner stepped away from touring, then returned one more time.
The Tina! 50th Anniversary Tour in 2008-2009 marked her retirement from live performance. The tour commemorated fifty years in the business, from the 1958 recording as Little Ann through the entire arc that had followed. It was, by the accounts of those who attended, a final demonstration of what Tina Turner on stage meant — a performance scaled to an arena, by a performer who had played arenas since the 1980s, who understood every dimension of the technical and physical demands of that format.