The structural problem was one of technological disruption: the music industry had developed its royalty structures over decades based on physical formats (records, tapes, CDs) and then broadcast (radio, television), and the economics of those formats did not translate straightforwardly to the economics of digital streaming. The transition to digital created a period — roughly from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s — in which the people who had made the music that was being consumed at unprecedented scale were not being compensated at anything approaching the scale of that consumption.
This is not a problem unique to Rick Astley or to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It is one of the defining economic disruptions of the early digital era for the music industry as a whole. But it is particularly visible in the rickrolling story because the scale of the discrepancy — billions of plays, $12 in royalties — is so extreme as to be almost comic.
The situation has changed since then. The official YouTube channel upload in October 2009 enabled the rights holders to claim and track revenue from the video going forward. The 2023 lawsuit against Yung Gravy, while a different legal matter concerning a different song, illustrates that Astley and his legal team are now actively engaged in protecting and enforcing the commercial value of his catalog. The economics of the meme, in retrospect, were not what the attention suggested — but they were not static, and the accumulation of over 1.7 billion official views has not remained entirely without financial consequence.