Music: Tina Turner's colossal deal with BMG

Tina Turner in Ghent, Belgium on May 10, 1996 (illustrative image).

© Gie Knaeps / Getty Images

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

It's a colossal deal.

81-year-old American artist and singer Tina Turner, often referred to as the 'Queen of Rock and Roll', has sold her music rights to BMG for an undisclosed amount.

The label (a subsidiary of the international Bertelsmann group) qualifies the operation as "

 the largest artist acquisition ever carried out by the company

 ".

A strong trend in the world of music where some stars resell their catalog to face sales at half mast.

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The timing couldn't have been better for Tina Turner who will be inducted into the

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

at the end of October.

An exceptional career, since at 81 years old, the artist has become one of the best-selling thanks to five platinum albums among his ten studio albums, two live albums, and five compilations that have sold over 100 million dollars. 'copies.

For BMG, the acquisition of such a windfall, with successes such as “Simply the best”, “What's love got to do with it” or “Private dancer”, will make it possible to reach a younger audience through

streaming

and social networks. 

Not the first

Tina Turner is not the first to sell her copyright and her catalog, More and more musicians are getting rid of their titles, like recently Paul Simon, Neil Young or Bob Dylan.

And the sums sometimes reach several hundreds of millions of dollars.

Fall in concert revenues

The reasons: the decline in sales of recordings and the fall in concert revenues due to the pandemic.

The revenues from the

streaming

and series

boom

are increasingly gaining in value and have become highly coveted in the music industry.

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