$1.8 million a year. That’s how much former Police frontman Sting gets for a sample of his hit ‘Every breath you take’. The American rapper Diddy pays that amount because he did not ask permission for the sample.
American producer/rapper Diddy (53) put the dots on the i on Wednesday about his hit ‘I’ll be missing you’ from 1997. In it he used a sample of ‘Every breath you take’, a song by The Police from 1983 Diddy said on Twitter that he pays “5,000 dollars every day”, or just under 4,600 euros.
In an interview with The Breakfast Club, a breakfast show on American radio station Power 105.1, Sting already said in 2018 that he received a nice fee from Diddy, because he had only asked permission to use the song after the release of the single ‘I’ll be missing you’. sample. “Now I get $2,000 a day for it. And that until the end of my life. That’s the deal we made amicably. Besides, we’re good friends now.’
Now Diddy announced that the amount is actually even higher: $ 5,000. That means an annual bonus of $ 1.8 million for Sting.
Notorious Big
‘I’ll be missing you’ was Diddy’s second hit single in 1997 – who then worked under the name Puff Daddy. The song was a tribute to the Notorious BIG, the rapper who was shot dead that year at the age of 24. The murder has never been solved. At that year’s MTV Music Awards, Diddy, Sting and Faith Evans, ex of the Notorious BIG, sang the song together.
Paying 5,000 euros a day for a sample is a lot of money. But Diddy also earned a lot from the song. The single was at the top of the US charts Billboard 100 for no less than eleven weeks. The number also recorded 23 weeks in our Ultratop, six of which were in first place.
