He was not miserable. He was, by his own account, fine.
## The Industry He Left and What It Did to Others
The context of the 1980s British pop music industry is worth establishing not as background color but as the specific environment against which Astley’s decision needs to be read.
The Stock Aitken Waterman machine was phenomenally successful at producing hit singles and was, simultaneously, an operation in which the interests of individual artists were clearly subordinate to the commercial logic of the whole system. This is not an unusual arrangement in pop music — the tension between artistic autonomy and commercial production is as old as the industry — but SAW made it particularly explicit. The artists who came through the PWL system were frequently not credited as writers on the songs they recorded, received relatively modest royalty arrangements compared to the producers, and had limited creative input into the music associated with their names and faces.
Pete Waterman has been candid about this in subsequent years. He has also, famously, revealed that he received approximately £11 from the enormous YouTube-era streaming revenues generated by “Never Gonna Give You Up” at the height of the rickrolling phenomenon — not because he was cheated, but because the royalty accounting for streaming was, in the era when rickrolling peaked, structured in ways that favored platforms over rights holders. That figure — £11 — from one of the most-heard songs on the internet at a specific moment is a particular illustration of how the economics of the music industry were restructured by the digital transition in ways that the people who made the music of the 1980s did not anticipate and were often not equipped to benefit from.