Diddy says he pays Sting $5k per day for “I’ll Be Missing You”
The 1997 single famously samples Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.”
Update: Diddy says he was just kidding around. "[Sting] 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."
Passive income, the act of making money from investments, properties, or anything that doesn't involve a lot of work, is a big deal to the kind of finance bros who love to make TikToks about their grindset. Sting doesn't strike me as someone who has ever even heard the phrase "side hustle" and yet it seems he's sitting on a pretty sweet one. Essentially having Diddy pay him $5k a day for the rights to his 1983 single “Every Breath You Take.”
That is how much Diddy claims he pays Sting for his role in "I’ll Be Missing You," the 1997 single written in honor of the late Notorious B.I.G. Not that this is news, per se, as Sting spoke about it in a 2018 interview with The Breakfast Club, claiming he receives $2,000 a day. The sample was famously uncleared when the song was initially released.
Either he was wrong or inflation has really kicked in, but Diddy shared on Twitter that the figure is actually more than double that. A clip of the interview resurfaced on Twitter this week and Diddy stepped in to clarify, “Nope. 5K a day. Love to my brother @OfficialSting!” That's a cool $1.8M a year, more than enough to keep a man in yoga pants and lute strings.
This post was updated on Fridy, April 7 at 3:04 p.m. to include a new statement from Diddy.