Sting Earns $5,000 Daily from Diddy’s Unauthorized Song Sampling

While my favorite song about stalking is ‘One Way or Another’ by Blondie, most people cite the Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ as the best song about the shadowy pursuit of unrequited love. Singer Sting croons, “Every breath you take and every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I’ll be watching you.”

The song was the biggest hit in the U.S. in 1983, topping the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for eight weeks. It was nominated for three Grammy Awards and won two, including Song of the Year. Rolling Stone and Billboard ranked it as the No. 1 song for 1983. In 2019, it was recognized by BMI as being the most played song in radio history, with nearly 15 million radio plays.

In 1997, rapper Sean Combs, also known as Puff Daddy or Diddy, sampled “Every Breath You Take” in his hit “I’ll Be Missing You.” While Sting sang about the loss of a romantic love, Combs rapped about his heartache over the loss of platonic love, after his fellow rapper and best friend Christopher Wallace, also known as the Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, was killed in a drive-by shooting in L.A. Combs was accompanied on the song by singer Faith Evans, Wallace’s widow.

“I’ll Be Missing You” actually outperformed its predecessor by topping the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 weeks. The tune also won a Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. When Combs performed the song at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, he was joined onstage by Sting, who sang with him.

Writer Spike Milligan famously said, “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.” While Sting may have written the song about a broken heart, “Every Breath You Take” is estimated to have generated between a quarter and a third of Sting’s music publishing income. This is considerable, seeing as he sold the rights to his music catalog in 2022 for hundreds of millions of dollars.

However, he still gets a check every year from Combs for sampling the song in “I’ll Be Missing You.”

Combs and Evans wrote the song as a tribute and final goodbye to Wallace. Rolling Stone claimed the song was “a radiant hymn of brotherly love and a community’s loss.” But in his rush to share the song with that community so they could grieve together, Combs failed to secure the legal rights to the sample before releasing it.

Sting told Rolling Stone that when Elton John heard “I’ll Be Missing You” for the first time, he told him, “You’re gonna be a millionaire!” He was right. Sting sued Combs and was awarded 100% of the song’s royalties. The rapper reportedly must pay Sting annually until 2053.

During an interview on ‘The Breakfast Club,’ a nationally syndicated radio show, Sting revealed that Combs pays him $2,000 every day “for the rest of his life” for illegally using the song. After hearing of this, Combs corrected the singer, tweeting, “Nope, 5K a day. Love to my brother @Official Sting!”

$5,000 a day times 365 days equals $1,825,000 a year. “I put a couple of my kids through college with the proceeds,” Sting has said. “And me and Diddy are good pals still.”

Don’t feel too bad for Combs, however, as Forbes estimated that he earned $90 million in 2022, and in 2019, estimated his net worth at $740 million.

But even with all that money, paying someone $5,000 a day still must sting.

Source: Appleton Post-Crescent, Rolling Stone