Yesterday morning, TMZ reported that R&B star Nelly had been hit with a $2.4 million tax lien from the IRS. And while Nelly is reportedly in talks to find the best ways to settle that debt—presumably involving asset seizures and the world’s biggest cosmetic Band-Aid sale—the artist’s fans have taken it upon themselves to organize another path for the Country Grammar star to overcome his financial woes.
Inspired by a piece in Spin—which estimated that it would take, at bare minimum, 287,176,547 streams of Nelly’s hit song “Hot In Herre” on Spotify to cover his debt—fans have launched the #SaveNelly campaign. The idea is simple: Every time someone finds the right time to shoot their steez and play the song, Nelly gets somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084. So all people have to do is play “Hot In Herre” for a collective 2,647 years or so, and the debt will easily be paid.
And while that seems like a lot of plays—and probably wouldn’t cover the actual amount needed, given that Spin got its numbers using the most optimistic payout structure, and the money would still need to be split with Nelly’s publisher and label—it’s worth noting that Spotify has 39 million paid listeners at the moment. So all it would take is for everybody to band together and stream the song for the rest of the day, and Nelly could get back to his life’s work of letting people know that it’s hot in here, and that they should probably take off all their clothes.