The financial relationship between one billion YouTube views and the people who made the song has been addressed directly in the public record. Astley himself said, as of August 2010, that his YouTube earnings from the song amounted to approximately $12. Waterman’s figure, for the first major surge of the meme in 2009, was approximately £11 in royalties. These figures are the result of the specific royalty structures that governed YouTube payments in the early years of the platform, structures that have since changed but that, in the period when rickrolling was at its cultural peak, produced financial returns to rights holders that were genuinely negligible relative to the cultural impact being measured in billions of plays.
The song is certified five times platinum in the United States by the RIAA. It has been certified platinum in numerous other markets. Its physical and digital sales across the decades since 1987 have made it one of the better-performing songs of its era in catalog terms. But the specific connection between the meme’s billion-plus views and the financial returns to the people who made the song is not simple, and it is not a story of the meme producing wealth proportional to its attention.
## The Album Made in a Home Studio
The 2016 album *50* is the commercial and artistic peak of Astley’s return years, and its making is one of the more interesting production stories in the context of modern music.
He wrote it. He produced it. He played all of the instruments on it himself. He made it in his home studio in Surrey.