Name: Nelly.

Age: 41.

It’s getting hot in here. It most certainly is. It’s this Indian summer we’re having. Hottest on record since the 1940s, apparently.

So take off all your clothes. I will do no such thing! Just because it’s a tad warm out doesn’t mean I should lose my sense of decorum.

Sorry, I was just singing a popular tune by the rap artist Nelly. Thank goodness for that. Instead of singing it, though, you may wish to stream it, and get the man who made it out of a bit of a spot.

Oh dear. What has he done now? Is he – ha ha – in a bit of a “Dilemma”? You could say that. It’s been reported that Nelly hasn’t been paying his taxes, and not just in a “skimping on the odd bit and attempting to attribute it to spurious expenses” way. Nelly owes $2.4m (£1.8m) to the US government.

Good gravy! You don’t just have that knocking about. Is he going to be able to pay it? Well, his fans hope they will be able to help, and have started the #savenelly hashtag to ensure everybody knows of his unfortunate “having to pay back money he actually owes” plight. “I couldn’t save Harambe,” says one devotee, “but goddammit I’m saving you.”

How are they going about it? Sponsored walks? Crowdfunding site? They’re going to save Nelly the way that surely every artist wants to be saved – via the gift of their music. It has been calculated that if you stream Nelly’s music enough times through Spotify, it will earn him enough money to pay back the taxes he owes.

And how many times is that? Somewhere between 280m and 403m.

That’s quite a lot of Nelly. Yes it is. Indeed, it was calculated that if one person were to pay off Nelly’s tax debt by themselves, simply by streaming Hot In Herre over and over again and accumulating the microscopic royalty that goes with each stream, it would take 2,076 years to settle the debt.

Nelly probably doesn’t want to wait that long. One option, of course, is to follow the example of the not-very-notable funk band Vulfpeck.

I am not familiar with their music. You don’t have to be. They, though, had the idea that if they released 31-second snippets of silence, which effectively qualify as a “play” according to Spotify’s 30-second rule, they could ask their fans to stream silence all night and accumulate cash for nothing.

So I could help Nelly out of his situation without having to listen to him for 2,000 years? It would be a win-win situation.

Do say: “Hashtag hotinherrestreamingparty.”

Don’t say: “Hashtag sendhimtoprisoncountry- grammarwasrubbish.”