Diddy Still Pays Sting $5,000 A Day For Using His Song Without Permission, 26 Years Later The 1997 hit "I'll Be Missing You" sampled the Police's "Every Breath You Take."
By Emily Rella
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Looks like Diddy is giving up money with every breath he takes.
The rapper and mogul, whose real name is Sean Combs, took to Twitter on Wednesday to reveal he's still paying big bucks for sampling the Police's 1983 hit "Every Breath You Take" on his own 1997 song "I'll Be Missing You" (he went by Puff Daddy then).
Diddy responded to a resurfaced clip of The Breakfast Club in 2018 with Sting (who was Police's lead singer) where he was asked if the rumors of Diddy paying him "$2,000 a day" for sampling the song without Sting's permission were true.
"Yes," Sting confirmed, "For the rest of his life."
Nope. 5K a day. Love to my brother @OfficialSting! https://t.co/sHdjd0UZEy
— LOVE (@Diddy) April 5, 2023
Diddy reposted the clip and corrected the information, telling his followers it was not $2,000 — it's actually $5,000.
Sting also confirmed that Diddy asked him for permission to use the song "after the fact."
Mathematically, if Diddy paid Sting $5,000 per day for the past 26 years since the song was released, he would have already paid the musician a casual $47,450,000.
"We're very good friends now," Sting added, with Diddy also calling him his "brother."
"I'll Be Missing You" was released in 1997 as a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G. — who was killed in March of that year — 14 years after Sting's classic hit the charts. Sting and Diddy also famously performed the hit together at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs).
In a 2003 interview with Rolling Stone, Sting joked about the money he had made off Diddy's hit.
"Those guys just take your shit, put it on a record and deal with the legality later," he told the outlet at the time. "Elton John told me, 'You gotta hear ["I'll Be Missing You"], you're gonna be a millionaire!' I said, 'I am a millionaire!' He said, 'You're gonna be a millionaire twice over!' I put a couple of my kids through college with the proceeds, and me and P. Diddy are good pals still."
Diddy, who also used to go by P. Diddy, has multiple streams of income thanks to his successful music career, his record label Bad Boy Records, and a multi-year investment deal with liquor company, Ciroq.
His net worth as of Friday morning was an estimated $900 million.
