Diddy Said He Pays Sting 5K a Day for Unauthorized Sample Usage

In the age of the internet, there are countless examples that show how much money a million or billion dollars truly is. The Jeff Bezos rice video immediately comes to mind. A million seconds is like 11 days, and a billion seconds is like 33 years. That's off the top of the dome. I'm not looking up the actual numbers, but it's something along those lines. Those numbers (million & billion) are thrown around so much that I feel like it's been normalized that a million bucks isn't a ton of money. It still is. I'd take a million right now. If you made $75,000 a year and didn't spend a cent of it, it'd take you over 13 years to save a million dollars. When you realize how much money the rich actually have, it's insane.

Look at Diddy née Puff Daddy. I knew he was rich; you likely did as well. But it takes a different type of rich to spend FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS A DAY paying a fellow millionaire musician because you stole their bassline in a song paying homage to your murdered pal (R.I.P. B.I.G.) and not have it devastate you. 

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

— LOVE (@Diddy) April 5, 2023

Even though both of these men are loaded, that's still live changing money to regular people. Image if you got 5k a day for a fucking month, forget a lifetime. That's $140-155K depending on the month.

​I can't front, when I first saw this story I thought it was a joke. Since Sting and Sean's numbers were different maybe there's some truth to that, but if Diddy is telling the truth, that means he's paying Sting $1,8250,000 a year ($1,8255,000 on leap years) for sampling "Every Breathe You Take" in his Grammy winning #1 hit. 1.82M a year since 1997 is nearly 50 million dollars.

Upon further research, the Sting clip that Diddy quote-tweeted is from a 2018 interview. Last year, Sting sold the rights to his songwriting catalog to Universal for $300 million, so in a lame twist, Diddy is really paying a corporation $5K a day.

Morale of the story, you should always get permission before sampling someone. I'm a huge music guy and I still barely understand (aka not at all) how all the legal shit with rights and usage works. I guess Puffy ain't sweating too much!!!

Regardless of how much Diddy has to pay and who it's going to, you can't put a price on art (that is a lie!). This is still one of the best live performances in award show history. It's so sad that the VMAs are irrelevant now.

P.S.

Speaking of Diddy, his performance in Get Him to the Greek is outstanding!