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One of Sean "Diddy" Combs' tweets last week made headlines when he wrote that he paid Police frontman Sting $5,000 a day for using one of his samples without permission. After the story went viral on Thursday, April 6th, Diddy followed up with another tweet explaining he had been joking.
"I want y’all to understand I was joking!" he wrote on Friday, April 7th. "It’s called being Facetious! Me and @OfficialSting have been friends for a long time! He never charged me $3K or $5K a day for Missing You."
The song in question was Diddy's 1997 hit "I'll Be Missing You" which sampled Sting's 1983 hit with The Police, "Every Breathe You Take." Diddy continued, "He probably makes more than $5K a day from one of the biggest songs in history," and ended the message with "LOVE." Diddy clearly found the whole situation comical as he included the crying laughing emoji at the end of his tweet.
It all started when a Twitter account shared a clip from Sting's 2018 interview on The Breakfast Club. "Is it true Diddy has to pay you 2 grand a day because he didn't ask permission to sample "Every Breath You Take?" Charlemagne Tha God asks, to which Sting replies, "Yeah. For the rest of his life." The rocker goes on to say that he asked permission after the fact and they're "very good friends" now. "It was a beautiful version of that song," Sting said.