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#SaveNelly campaign aims to pay rapper’s tax bill through streaming alone

By | Published on Tuesday 20 September 2016

Nelly

Streams of Nelly’s ‘Hot In Herre’ jumped 219% in the US last week, thanks to a campaign to pay off his tax bill that gained support from Stephen Colbert and James Corden.

TMZ broke the news last week that the rapper owed just short of $2.5 million in federal taxes. And an additional $150,000 in unpaid state taxes bumps him over that milestone. Although the report notes that Nelly is “already working with the tax authorities to resolve the issue”, fans quickly moved to help him clear the bill a bit faster.

The #SaveNelly campaign urges people to stream 2002 hit ‘Hot In Herre’ on repeat while they sleep, aiming to get enough people on board to get that $2.5 million into his bank account through streaming royalties.

Based on the never entirely reliable average per stream rates from Spotify (and bearing in mind that different royalty rates apply for free versus premium streams), Spin reckons that Nelly needs somewhere between 287 million and 403 million streams in order to make up his shortfall. Last week, according to Billboard, ‘Hot In Herre’ plays were well up on the previous week, though still totalled less than a million, so it’s going to take a while for the campaign to reach its total.

And, of course, that all assumes that Nelly sees 100% of any income generated by Universal release ‘Hot In Herre’, which seems unlikely. But even so, if the campaign maintains its current level of support, Nelly could well have paid off this tax bill by some time in the next century.



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