In Mark Curry’s upcoming book Dancing With the Devil, the former Bad Boy rapper-turned-author exposes some of his former boss’ business tricks. Sean Combs, aka Diddy, allegedly scams his artists by pressuring them to let him sing on their songs and dance in their videos so he can collect a higher royalty fee for the song. Even his car has an appearance fee.
HipHopDX reports (via thisis50.com), “[Diddy] charged artists, for example, for having his Bentley in his videos-which he insisted upon- then took tax credit for business use of a car,” Curry wrote. Maybe Diddy should put the Bad Boy logo on his $300k ride and write it off for the whole year!
The biggest problem with Combs’ alleged trickery was that he didn’t tell the artists about his fees beforehand. “Puff charged the artists for his appearance on their records and videos, usually without [them] realizing it until they receive their royalty statements,” Curry writes. “That’s when they discovered that their large sums of money had gone to fees which were doubled, tripled and even quadrupled because of Puff’s ‘special appearances.’”
It’s hard to quantify the damage Combs is really doing to these artists because in all fairness, he often plucks them from obscurity and hands them a career. That way they can go on to charge other people for having their cars appear in videos.
I’ll spare you all the “Mo Money Mo Problems” jokes.