Nelly’s Fans Have Come Up with an Interesting Way to Solve his Tax Problems

Rapper Nelly has some nasty headaches with the IRS. A cheque must have been lost in the mail because the government insists that Nelly owes them $2.4 million. The problem? Nelly doesn’t have that kind of cash lying around. He does, though, has some seriously committed fans.

If you search Twitter for #savenelly, you’ll find a crowdsourcing campaign designed to get him out of his tax hole. And it’s quite clever, actually.

Instead of passing the hat to raise money the old fashioned way, Nelly’s fans aim to get Spotify to pay him enough cash so he can get the IRS off his back. Organizers calculate if they can convince enough people to stream songs from Nelly’s catalogue, he’ll earn eventually enough in royalties to pay his tax bill.

The task is, however, formidable. They’ve calculated that Nelly’s songs will have to be streamed somewhere between 280,000,000 and 403,000,000 times. That’s a lot. But if enough people come to the rescue, it’s doable.

The Guardian has the rest of the story here. And if you’d like to help out with a minuscule donation via YouTube, click on the video below.