On July 14, Jay-Z sat down with Kevin Hart for an interview and talked about how nowadays he doesn’t charge to do features on songs.
“Pretty much every song that I’m on, I’m asked to be on,” Jay-Z said. “I don’t ask people to be on their songs. I never charge.”
That last sentence recently caught the ear of Joe Budden, who came out on July 18 during the “Flip Da Script” podcast and said that Jay-Z charged him $250,000 to lay a verse on his hit song “Pump It Up.”
“I don’t think that was a big number, I think that was his number,” Budden said. “It was just big in my world, but it wasn’t a big number.”
Budden continues to explain that he didn’t know any better because he was new to the music industry.
“I’m super young at that moment,” Budden said. “It was a Just Blaze beat and I was green behind the ears. I just thought that it would get done. I didn’t know anything about the business and how things like that are supposed to go.”
Having Jay-Z on one of your songs has to be a surreal moment, but paying that much might have you second-guessing a lot of things.
