Active mostly from 1960 to 1976, husband and wife Ike & Tina Turner were one of the most significant black act of their era.

If at some point the struggles of the couple and the violent behavior of Ike were almost as famous as their songs, their catalog remained relevant though the years, with Tina Turner notoriously re-recording their biggest hits for her 1993 biographical film What's Love Got To Do With It.

Their body of work was fundamental musically speaking, with an hybrid sound encompassing R&B, Rock, Pop, Soul and Blues. We wonder if their commercial success matched their impact in the evolution of the black music scene.

A big picture of Ike & Tina Turner's career

Born in November 5, 1931, Ike Turner joined his first group, the Tophatters, way back in 1946. When the big band split in a Jazz ensemble and a blues set of musicians, Turner became the leader of the latter. The Kings of Rhythm were born.

A musical genius, he would spend the next years performing again and again, all night long until the public had left. During the day, he was a highly rated session musician.

The group recorded Rocket 88 in March 1951. While there's no consensus among music historians to define the very first rock and roll song ever, as it was a progressive evolution, this song is often listed among the most fundamental recordings. The song was #1 on Billboard Best Selling R&B charts, the first hit for the artist.

While his singles failed to make waves on charts, his fame as a performer was growing continuously. In 1957, a 17-years old girl, Anna Mae Bullock, was impressed by Turner. As her sister was dating a member of the band, she got to know him.

Soon, she took the microphone to show she could sing. Ike Turner immediately recruited the one who was going to become Tina Turner.

While she quickly starting performing on shows, her first recording came the following year with Boxtop. On it, she was credited as Little Ann.

Ike and Tina Turner weren't together from the start. The latter actually dated the band's saxophonist, Raymond Hill, having her first child with him that year in 1958.

They got to spend more and more time together, ultimately getting into a relationship. Tina Turner became pregrant at the start of 1960. A couple of months later, Tina would record A Fool In Love as a replacement to Art Lassiter who missed the session.

The record reached ears of Juggy Murray, the president of Sue Records, who told Ike to put his then girlfriend in the spotlight giving how gifted she was.

The singer would follow these advices. The Kings of Rhythms became instrumentalists of the new band Ike & Tina Turner, with a trio of female singers backing them, the Ikettes.

A bit like Ike Turner did nearly a decade earlier, the new band quickly got a hit with that very same recording, A Fool In Love. The song peaked at #2 on R&B charts, with 4 more singles hitting the top 10 in the next 18 months.

While their singles sales went back down, and their LPs weren't doing well either, they were still profitable thanks for their 300+ yearly concerts.

In 1966, Phil Spector brought the duo's contract as he wanted to work with Tina Turner. Their first work together, River Deep, Mountain High went unnoticied in the US but peaked at #3 in the UK. Backstage, the relation between Ike & Tina Turner was chaotic, but to the public their profile started to grow steadily in late 60s.

Phil Spector also enabled them to enter the rock music family. Soon, they opened concerts for the Rolling Stones in the UK (1966) and the US (1969), welcoming a new audience. They used this opportunity to perfection, releasing covers of popular rock songs.

This gave them their first true crossover hit, Proud Mary, a #4 hit on the Hot 100 in 1971.

Most of their singles were still very moderate successes, but from time to time they were scoring big. The next up was Nutbush City Limits in 1973, a #22 single in the US but a top 5 smash in the UK, Germany, Italy and several more European countries. It was their last relevant single.

In 1976, after one more excess of violence from Ike, Tina decided she has had enough, filing for divorce. Unreleased recordings were used to issue two more studio albums, Delilah's Power in 1977 and The Edge in 1980, although the later was credited to Ike Turner solo.

As usual, I'll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge their results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Ike & Tina Turner's albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will also determine their true popularity.

If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, below is a nice and short video of explanations. I fully recommend watching it before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the numbers directly.

The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)

There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. The first is the Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a few minutes.

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If you are a mathematical person, and want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.

Now let's get into the artist's sales figures in detail in order to apply this concept and define the act's true popularity!

Ike & Tina Turner Album Sales

Updated Studio Album Sales & Comments

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The least we can say is that most of these numbers are unimpressive. That's what happens when you start before the explosion of the album format, and come from the black music scene, with a public that got into LPs years later due to their less favorable financial situation.

They had to wait until 1969, nearly a decade in, to get their first Billboard Top 200 albums entry with a studio album, Outta Season peaking at #91.

Only one album outdid this peak until their break up, 1970's Workin' Together which climbed as high as #25 thanks to the success of Proud Mary. This is their only Gold-eligible studio set in the US (500,000 units), which greatly contributes to its near-million sales globally.

Maybe the most surprising fact is that many of their albums sold more abroad than on their homeland. The best illustration of this situation is 1966's River Deep - Mountain High, which went up to 1.65 million units thanks to heavy budget sales in Europe before and after the explosion of Tina Turner solo in mid-80s.

Overall, their 20 studio sets combine for 6.42 million pure sales, a fairly low average of 320,000 units a piece.

Want to compare Ike & Tina Turner's albums with others?

Ike & Tina Turner songs sales

Below, we list down results from the artist through physical sales, digital sales and streaming.

Please be aware that when the artist is regarded as the lead act, he is rewarded with 100% of these units, while featured acts share among them a 50% piece of the totals.

Physical Singles

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As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between albums and physical singles.

While Ike & Tina Turner performed better with singles sales rather than albums sales, they were no top sellers either.

It started decently, with both A Fool in Love and It's Gonna Work Out Fine hitting #2 on R&B charts, while they peaked at #27 and #14 in the main Hot 100. Both songs moved close to half a million sales, almost exclusively from the US.

Poor Fool, a #4 R&B and #38 Hot 100 hit, sold almost as much through several releases. Follow up Tra La La La La (#50) was also a good seller. From mid-1960 to mid-1962, their output moved over 1.7 million units.

This promising start looked like their hey-days for long. In fact, for the next 4 years and despite more than 20 singles released, their top hit was I Can't Believe What You Say, which struggled to reach 6-digits sales and barely made the Hot 100 with a #95 peak.

River Deep - Mountain High came out for the summer of 1966. It wasn't that much bigger in the US with a #88 position, but it did sell better than its peak suggested, while it was a hit in the UK (#3) and sold more copies here and there across Europe.

The song quickly became a strandard, with artists like Deep Purple, The Animals and The Supremes & The Four Tops successfully releasing covers from 1968 to 1970.

Thanks to this new exposure, the original track kept being reissued and on print, ultimately selling nearly 900,000 units, almost 400,000 of which came from the UK.

Some moderate hits like I've Been Loving You Too Long, So Fine, or Bold Soul Sister filled the gap until the release of their famous rock covers.

At the very end of the decade, they ambitiously released a double A single with covers from both The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, Honky Tonk Women and Come Together. It went on to sell almost 300,000 units.

On a good moment, the duo issued I Want To Take You Higher which became their first top 40 hit (#34) since 1961. It sold over 400,000 units, mostly from the US.

Some months later, at the start of January 1971, Proud Mary, a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1969 hit, was released. Just like the original, Ike & Tina Turner's version cracked a million sales in the US, while going as high as #4 inside the Hot 100.

A good evidence of their growing profile among rock fans is that the song actually peaked lower on R&B charts (at #5) than in the main chart. The UK was unimpressed with it though, while it sold decently in continental Europe.

The song got significant sales from 2-on-1 oldies releases as well, pushing its total to more than 2 million units.

Two summers later Nutbush City Limits got almost as big. Ironically considering its theme, it wasn't as strong in the US (#22, below half a million sales), but it was a smash in Europe (#4 in the UK, #2 in Germany, #1 in Austria among others) where it also charted several times with new releases in 1978, 1988, and 1991 (this one credited as a solo Tina Turner song).

Combined, these versions moved nearly 2 million units, another big hit for the duo, which sold close to 12 million physical singles through their career.

Digital Songs

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As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1.5 ratio between albums and digital singles.

Half a century after their last big hit, Ike & Tina Turner's catalog is naturally focused around their largest songs by now.

Proud Mary is the clear leader, with no less than 1.8 million digital sales. It's a solid 70s recurrent seller all around the world.

Far behind but still well remembered are both River Deep - Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits around half a million units each.

The only other song with more than 50,000 sales is their breakthrough hit A Fool In Love which is closing in 200,000.

Streaming

Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track.

The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. To factor in the growing impact of multiple Asian countries where these platforms aren't always the go-to site for music streaming, more sources have been added.

In order to account for their real popularity in each relevant country, the below sources have been used along with the mentioned ratios that reflect the market share of each area.

Audio Streams
– South Korea: Genie streams * 2.20 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan: AWA streams * 100 / 4 (AWA has 4% of the Japanese streaming market)
– Arabic world: Anghami streams
– Sub-Saharan Africa: Boomplay + Audiomack streams
– Elsewhere: Spotify streams * Spotify market shares based on artists' market distribution

Video Streams
– China* : QQ video streams * 50 if the song is available for audio stream, QQ video streams * 5 elseway (scale built based on known figures for several major artists)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views increased by 10% to account for various local platforms

*since Chinese streaming platforms are mostly video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted on par with YouTube streams.

Audio Stream value – 1,500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream value – 6,750 views equal 1 album unit

Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * ArtistRatio + Genie * 2.20 + AWA * 100 / 4 + Anghami + Boomplay + Audiomack ) / 1500 + ( QQ views* 50(or 5) + YouTube * 1.1 ) / 6750

Top Hits

Just like with downloads, the picture of Ike & Tina Turner's catalog is very clear: Proud Mary ahead, River Deep - Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits completing a solid top 3 and not much significant behind.

It's worth mentioning that these numbers include streams from solo Tina Turner versions which were recorded for 1993's What's Love Got To Do With It movie soundtrack.

As most 60s R&B acts, their numbers in Asia are irrelevant. Cumulatively, they are around half a billion on both Spotify and YouTube.

Full catalog breakdown

If you are familiar with the artist's catalog and want to check details of each and every song, you can access to all of them right here.

Keep yourself up to date

Our website provides you a fantastic tool which fetches updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!

Want to compare Ike & Tina Turner's songs with other top hits?

Ike & Tina Turner compilations sales

It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era - studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams - to get the full picture of an album's popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.

All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP.

Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.

The distribution process

How to understand this table? If you check this example of the Greatest Hits [1976] line, those figures mean it sold 750,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 422,276 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part on the right of the table shows how many equivalent streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package.

Thus, streaming figures tell us songs from Workin' Together are responsible for 69% of Greatest Hits [1976] tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated 520,000 of its 750,000 album sales and so on for the other records.

Compilations sales figures listing

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Full Length related records Sales – Summary

Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album’s success – the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw.

These numbers are obtained by applying the method from the section The distribution process to all packages listed under Compilation sales figures listing category.

Albums containing the biggest hits are logically ahead, with Workin' Together alone powering more than 8.5 million sales. It goes on to show that while their studio album sales and physical singles, they did move a large amount of compilations over the years.

Some of these sales come from greatest hits credited after Tina Turner, who too advantage of these early hits to make her catalog more consistent and her compilations worthier.

Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

Please note country-specific numbers may miss sales of a few minor releases, although totals are complete.

Ike & Tina Turner Career CSPC Results

So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each Ike & Tina Turner album achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!

Albums CSPC results

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For a band which was largely focus on live performance (their real name was Ike & Tina Turner Revue), a final total of almost 35 million equivalent album sales is still quite good.

Workin' Together, home to Proud Mary, leads the way at 11 million sales. Both River Deep - Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits stand around 5 million.

At a lower scale but still good successes are 4 more million sellers, The Soul of Ike & Tina Turner (2.5 million), So Fine & Outta Season (1.5 million each), and Come Together (1.2 million).

The remaining 13 albums combine for 4.6 million sales, an average of 350,000 units per release. The last 2.5 million sales come from orphan tracks.

Singles CSPC results

The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats. Instead, it includes weighted sales of the song's physical single, download, ringtone and streaming as well as its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

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Discography results

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Dynamic Spotify Key Performance Indicators

Please note that numbers below are retrieved automatically, so they will evolve day by day unlike previously listed data which is valid as of the publication date of the article.

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As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs, Billboard.

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