Diddy Says He Pays Sting $5K Per Day For ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ Sample

Sting may have sold his music catalogue for a monster $300 million last year – but he’s still raking in almost $2 million a year in royalties from a single song.

That’s according to Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs who Tweeted this week that he pays Sting $5,000 a day for the sample he borrowed from Sting & The Police’s 1983 smash ‘I’ll Be Watching You’:

Nope. 5K a day. Love to my brother @OfficialSting! 😎 ✊🏿🫶🏿 https://t.co/sHdjd0UZEy

— LOVE (@Diddy) April 5, 2023

Apparently, Diddy did not seek Sting’s permission when sampling the track for his own 1997 hit ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, because I guess he either thought Sting wouldn’t notice or that he’d feel sorry for him because the song was a tribute to his buddy Biggie Smalls who had been shot dead prior to the track’s release.

In the end, the song was a universal smash hit and so of course Sting wanted a piece of the pie – which resulted in the music gods ruling that Diddy had to pay him $5k a day, or more than $1.8 million a year in royalties.

Sting previously spoke about his royalties from Diddy’s hit in a 2003 interview with Rolling Stone:

Those guys just take your s**t, put it on a record and deal with the legality later.

Elton John told me, ‘You gotta hear [‘I’ll Be Missing You’], you’re gonna be a millionaire!’ 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 P. Diddy are good pals still.

Well, it’s nice to know there’s no hard feelings over it, but then again Diddy is worth a few bob himself so $5k a day is probably no big deal for him. It’s crazy to think how much money ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ made/continues to make if the guy who was sampled on the track still makes that much from it. Does P Diddy see any royalties or are they all going to Sting at this pint?

In any case, it’s a lesson to always clear your samples before releasing any music. If the track had flopped, it’s doubtful Sting would have hunted Diddy down for a pay day, so maybe that’s why it was a ‘cross that bridge when we get to it’ situation for the Bad Boy Records founder. Worth it, probably: