Joe Budden recalls Jay-Z charging him a quarter million for the “Pump It Up” Remix.
In a recent interview with Kevin Hart, Jay-Z reveals that he never charges for collaborations as it’s mostly on relationships. However, that wasn’t the case around a couple of decades back, as he wanted a hefty price for a song with Joe Budden.
Joe Budden was the latest guest on Queenzflip and DJ G Money’s Flip Da Script Podcast, where he recalled Hov charging him $250,000 to hop on a remix of his 2003 hit “Pump It Up”. “I don’t think that was a big number, I think that was his number,” Budden said on the podcast. “‘That’s my number to rap on this new artist’s remix.’ It was just big in my world, but it wasn’t a big number.”
Looking back, Joe doesn’t think JAY overcharged. “That was par for the course. It was normal,” he said. “It was big to me because it was unattainable. It was outside of my budget, but the blessing was that he gave a number. If there was a way to get it, maybe this gets done. Maybe the start of your career goes different if you can find that money. But no, we didn’t have that.”
He continued, “Listen, I’m super young in that moment. I wasn’t in the studio when [Jay-Z and Joe Budden’s A&R Skane] had the conversation. I knew that they had some type of relationship. 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. That was par the course… It was big to me because it was unattainable… but the blessing was that he gave a number.”
Jay-Z later dropped a freestyle over the “Pump It Up” beat a month after Budden’s song released, and it appeared on his 2003 mixtape “The S. Carter Collection”.
Check out Joe Budden’s interview below.
