Sean “Diddy” Combs must pay – for Every Breath You Take.
The former rapper-turned-media mogul famously sampled the 1983 Sting song on I’ll Be Missing You, a 1997 tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., featuring Faith Evans.
However, he failed to ask Sting for permission to use the sample at the time – and it’s still costing him.
Sting confirmed as much during a 2018 Breakfast Club interview, when co-host Charlamagne tha God asked if “Diddy has to pay you two grand a day” for sampling the song.
“Yeah, for the rest of his life,” Sting claimed. “We’re very good friends, though.”
Diddy made a correction on Wednesday.
“Nope,” he wrote on Twitter with a resurfaced clip of The Breakfast Club interview. “5K a day. Love to my brother @OfficialSting!”
I’ll Be Missing You debuted at number one in the US and remains atop Billboard’s Greatest of All Time Songs of the Summer to this day. Sting performed the song live with Diddy at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards.
The UK singer told Rolling Stone in 2003 that rappers “just take your shit, put it on a record and deal with the legality later”. He said he first learned about “I’ll Be Missing You” from his friend Sir Elton John.
“Elton John told me, ‘You gotta hear [it], you’re gonna be a millionaire!’” Sting told the outlet. “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 [Diddy] are good pals still.”
Diddy, the founder of REVOLT TV who’s planning to buy a majority stake in BET, isn’t the only rapper to use Sting’s work.
Juice WRLD, who died in 2019, sampled Sting’s Shape Of My Heart for his Billboard-charting Lucid Dreams in 2017.
Sting told Billboard in 2018 that Lucid Dreams will “put my grandkids through college.”