After fans found out that Nelly owed the IRS more than $2.4 million in unpaid taxes last week, they sprung into action. Rallying behind the hashtag #SaveNelly, they encouraged everyone to stream his song "Hot In Herre" as many times as possible to earn the rapper enough money to pay off his debt.
One week later, it looks like their efforts are bearing fruit. According to Billboard, streams of "Hot In Herre" have increased by 90 percent. On Sept. 13, streams of the song went up by a whopping 219 percent—from a normal daily average of 50,000 to 60,000 streams to a much more robust 269,000. According to Spotify, Nelly had close to a 200 percent increase on Tuesday, Sept. 13 and Wednesday, Sept. 14 at 3 p.m., compared to those times on Sept. 6 and 7. Although it looks like enthusiasm tapered off a bit in the following days, the weekly streaming total for "Hot in Herre" of 714,000 streams still made for a 90 percent increase overall.
It's going to take quite a bit more than that to dig Nelly out of his financial hole. As Spin pointed out when fans first proposed the idea, people would have to stream the song at least 287,176,547 times in order to erase Nelly's entire $2 million in tax debt.
Thankfully for Nelly, he's not just relying on streaming or a hashtag campaign to bring in money. He recently celebrated a major career milestone after his album Country Grammar went diamond, moving 10 million units in the United States. The continued strong sales for his old work are sure to help him out a bit, although he certainly has a ways to go before he erases all his accumulated debt. Until then, keep streaming!
