“Every Breath You Take” Sampling Doesn’t Charge Me $5,000 A Day, American Rapper Diddy Says

American rapper Diddy clarified that it was just a joke that he pays The Police frontman Sting $5,000 a day. This was after Diddy claimed paying royalty payments after sampling The Policeman’s hit song “Every Breath You Take”.

On April 7, American rapper Diddy, 53, posted on Twitter that he was just joking when he claimed that he pays The Police frontman Sting, 71. This was after several outlets reported that Diddy pays royalty worth $5,000 a day for the sampling of The Police’s 1983 hit song “Every Breath You Take”. Diddy further clarified that he and Sting have been friends for a long time.

An article on National Today states that Diddy, who also goes by the stage names Puff Daddy or P. Diddy, is also an actor, a record producer, and record executive. Diddy worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding Bad Boy Records, his own record label, in 1993.

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“Every Breath You Take” Sampling

According to Breeden, Diddy heavily sampled on The Police’s 1983 hit song “Every Breath You Take” for “I’ll Be Missing You”, a tribute song to the late Biggie Smalls in 1997. However, Diddy clarified that Sting never charged him $5,000 or even $3,000 a day for the sampling.

This was after Diddy sent Twitter users into a frenzy on April 5 after retweeting a 2018 interview on Power 105.1 FM’s “The Breakfast Club”. In the interview, Sting reportedly confirmed that Diddy pays him $2,000 a day for the rest of his life for sampling “Every Breath You Take”.

However, when the show host Charlamagne tha God asked Sting if Diddy requested permission to sample the hit song “Every Breath You Take”, Sting replied that he had asked only after the tribute song had already been released. Nonetheless, Sting stated that he and Diddy are now very good friends.

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