title: Splitting a tuple in to a list without splitting it in to individual characters
body: <p>I am having issues with my Python code. I want to get the values from a tuple and put them in to lists. In the example below, I would like to get the artists in to one list, and the earnings in to another. Then put those in to a tuple.</p>
  
  <pre><code>def sort_artists(x):
      artist = []
      earnings = []
      z = (artist, earnings)
      for inner in x:
          artist += inner[0]
          earnings += inner[1]
      return z
  
  artists = [("The Beatles", 270.8), ("Elvis Presley", 211.5), ("Michael Jackson", 183.9)]
  print(sort_artists(artists))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can print `inner[0] and that will give me 'The Beatles', but when I try to append it to the empty list, it splits it up in to individual letters. What is wrong?</p>
  
  <p>The error (though I have tried it without the 'earnings' bit too, as well as using <code>append</code>, and other things:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "Artists.py", line 43, in &lt;module&gt;
      print(sort_artists(artists))
    File "Artists.py", line 31, in sort_artists
      earnings += inner[1]
  TypeError: 'float' object is not iterable
  Command exited with non-zero status 1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The desired output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>(['Elvis Presley', 'Michael Jackson', 'The Beatles'], [270.8, 211.5, 183.9]) 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is what is currently happening (without the earnings bit):</p>
  
  <pre><code>(['T', 'h', 'e', ' ', 'B', 'e', 'a', 't', 'l', 'e', 's', 'E', 'l', 'v', 'i', 's', ' ', 'P', 'r', 'e', 's', 'l', 'e', 'y', 'M', 'i', 'c', 'h', 'a', 'e', 'l', ' ', 'J', 'a', 'c', 'k', 's', 'o', 'n'], []) 
  </code></pre>