April 08, (THEWILL) – Sean Diddy Combs has stated that he didn’t pay Gordon Summer, aka Sting, $5,000 a day in royalties for sampling the songwriter’s hit track, ‘Every Breath You Take’.
The singer stated that his initial tweet was just a joke.
“I want y’all to understand I was joking! It’s called being facetious! I and @OfficialSting have been friends for a long time! He never charged me $3K or $5K a day for ‘Missing You’. He probably makes more than $5K a day from one of the biggest songs in history,” Diddy said in another tweet on Friday.
Diddy’s song, ‘I’ll be missing you’, which was sung in 1997, was a tribute to rapper, Christopher Wallace, aka Notorious B.I.G, who was murdered two months prior to the song’s release.
The widow of Notorious B.I.G, Faith Evans, featured in the track, which heavily sampled Sting’s single, ‘Every breath you take’.
The misconception over the non-existent royalties all started in 2018 when Sting granted an interview to the Breakfast Club.
The singer had claimed that he gets $2,000 a day from Diddy for sampling his song. He also stated that permission to use the sample was only asked after “I’ll Be Missing You” was released.
However, he admitted that he and Diddy later became good friends. “We’re very good friends now. “It was a beautiful version of that song,” he had stated.
A clip of the interview started trending last week Wednesday after it was shared on Twitter and Diddy himself re-tweeted the video with the caption “Nope, 5k a day. Love to my brother, @officialSting”.
