Sean “Diddy” Combs clarified that he was just “being facetious” when he said he pays “5K a day” in royalty payments to Sting.
“I want y’all to understand I was joking!” the Bad Boy Records founder, 53, tweeted Friday after multiple outlets reported on the hefty royalty payments. “It’s called being Facetious! Me and [Sting] have been friends for a long time!”
Diddy said that the rocker “never charged me $3K or $5K a day” for “I’ll Be Missing You,” the rapper’s 1997 hit tribute song to the late Biggie Smalls that heavily sampled The Police’s 1983 track “Every Breath You Take.”
“He probably makes more than $5K a day from one of the biggest songs in history,” Diddy concluded.
The music mogul sent Twitter users into a frenzy Wednesday when he retweeted a 2018 interview on Power 105.1 FM’s “The Breakfast Club,” in which Sting — born Gordon Sumner — confirmed that Diddy was paying him $2,000 a day “for the rest of his life” for sampling the song.
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“5K a day. Love to my brother [Sting],” tweeted Diddy.
While on the show, host Charlamagne tha God asked Sting, 71, if Diddy requested “permission” to use the track, to which the “Desert Rose” musician confirmed.
However, the “Roxanne” crooner — who said that he and the rapper are now “very good friends” — went on to say that Diddy only chose to ask the rockstar for permission after the song hit the airwaves.
As The Post previously reported, if the now-debunked deal had been put in place in 1997, the “Last Night” emcee would have paid Sting roughly $47.4 million dollars to date for the sampling.
Diddy’s chart-topping song came out two months after the Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down on March 9, 1997. He was 24 years old.
