American rapper Diddy said that he is paying Sting $5,000 (Dh18,362.9) per day for sampling the Police frontman’s 1983 blockbuster hit ‘Every Breath You Take’ on his own 1997 song ‘I’ll Be Missing You’.
Diddy tweeted in response to a resurfaced video clip from a 2018 interview Sting did with the Breakfast Club, reports Variety.
As noted by the Shade Room, the clips shows interviewer Charlamagne Tha God asking Sting to confirm whether Diddy pays him $2,000 (Dh7,345.2) daily for sampling the song on ‘I’ll Be Missing You’. Sting said yes, “for the rest of his life,” to laughter, and then confirmed that Diddy asked for permission to sample the hit after his own song was released.
He noted that there are no hard feelings and that the two are “are very good friends now,” adding: “It was a beautiful version of that song.”
As per Variety, presumably a large percentage of that daily $5,000 (Dh18,362.9) is going to Universal Music Publishing, which last year acquired the song along with most or all of Sting’s song catalogue in a deal reported to be worth around $350 million (Dh1,285.4 million). However, while terms of the deal were not disclosed, it seems likely that Sting kept at least some of the songs and the catalogue’s substantial publishing and/ or songwriter shares.
The comprehensive worldwide agreement includes the entirety of both Sting’s solo works as well as those with The Police, including ‘Roxanne’, ‘Every Breath You Take’, ‘Shape Of My Heart’, ‘If I Ever Lose My Faith In You’, ‘Fields Of Gold’, ‘Desert Rose’, ‘Message in a Bottle’, ‘Englishman in New York’ and ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’.
