The 2005 album *Portrait* was released on Sony BMG and reached number 26 on the UK album chart. This was not a chart position that commanded major media attention, but it was evidence of a persistent audience: a dedicated group of listeners who cared enough about Rick Astley’s music to buy his new album, not because they were being served the familiar past but because they were interested in what he was doing now. These listeners did not constitute a large enough base to generate the kind of chart performance that would have attracted major label investment in a major campaign, but they were real, and they were consistent.
The touring activity between 2004 and 2007 was part of the same sustained engagement with music as a working practice rather than a legacy commodity. The Japan tour with Boy George and Belinda Carlisle — the “Here and Now” 1980s package that allowed his family to travel with him — represents a mode of working that had become, by this point, compatible with the priorities he had cited when he stepped away in 1993. He was touring, but he was not doing it at the cost of his family life; he was doing it in a way that included them.
The rickrolling meme intersected with this ongoing, modest, genuine musical activity — not as the cause of the activity but as an accelerant that was layered on top of it. When the meme began generating its peak cultural noise in 2008, Astley was already an active musician with a recent album and ongoing touring activity. The meme added an enormous new audience of people who knew his name from their online experience rather than from any direct engagement with his music. What this new audience then did — whether they went back and listened to the original records, whether they became concert attendees, whether they bought his subsequent albums — is the variable that determines how much the meme contributed to the commercial recovery represented by *50* in 2016.