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Russ Breaks Down $1M Budget For Ed Sheeran ‘Are You Entertained’ Collab

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Russ has said that he spent a million dollars on his new Ed Sheeran collab “Are You Entertained,” and broke down exactly where that money went.

The Chomp 2 rapper offered a disclaimer before breaking down his finances, and said he’s had songs that he spent zero dollars on go multi-platinum and that he’s had songs go nowhere that he’s spent thousands of dollars on.

“The reason I was like, you know what I’m gonna spend a lot of money on this song is because I’m blessed enough to have a song with the number one artist in the world on Spotify, and I was like yeah you know what if im gonna push the button on something it’ll be this song.”

H continued, “So basically I spent $300k on the music video. We shot it in London, it was a whole big production, and I spent a little over $700k on marketing, which is like I did Spotify marquee campaigns, radio, social media ads, etc. etc.”

Russ’s money was well spent, as the track’s Jake Nava-directed video has already been viewed over 17 million times, while the new single has been streamed on Spotify just as many times.

After releasing the track, Russ took to Instagram to post a lengthy shoutout to both Ed Sheeran and the late Jamal Edwards, who passed away shortly after coming up with the idea for the music video.

“I’m so grateful for this moment,” Russ wrote. “I walked up to Ed at a restaurant (Carbone) and assumed he didn’t know who I was. Just wanted to introduce myself and say what’s up. Next thing I know I’m eating pasta and drinking wine at his table talkin bout everything.”

He continued, “Fast forward and we had this song and we wanted to shoot a video to it so he introduced me to Jamal Edwards, a brilliant visionary and special soul who wrote the treatment for the video. We went back and forth on ideas and we were all super excited. The day before we were supposed to fly out to London we got the tragic news that Jamal had passed away. I had never met Jamal other than those emails but I can tell he was a special person.

“I’m just beyond grateful that all of y’all let me be apart of something so special. Special thank you to everyone who made this happen and thank you to Brenda Edwards for being such a warrior of love and light. RIP Jamal Edwards.”

Watch the video for “Are You Entertained” below.