Research Brief

"Never Gonna Give You Up" is a pop song by English singer Rick Astley, released on 27 July 1987. The song was written by the British production team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, inspired by a woman Pete Waterman had been seeing for three years—after a three-hour phone call with the woman, Astley said, "You're never gonna give her up." It was recorded at PWL Studios in South London using a Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer for basslines, a Linn 9000 for drums and sequencing, a Roland Juno 106 analogue synthesiser, and Yamaha Rev5 and Rev7 reverberators. The song topped the charts in twenty-five different countries including the UK and the US.

The transcript provided is indeed the lyrics to this song, but the cultural phenomenon it represents is "Rickrolling"—one of the internet's most enduring memes. Rickrolling is an Internet meme and prank involving the unexpected appearance of the music video for the 1987 hit song, performed by Rick Astley, and is a type of bait and switch that commonly uses a disguised hyperlink that leads to the music video instead of what was expected. Rickrolling originated on 15 May 2007, when 4chan user Shawn Cotter uploaded the "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video to YouTube and linked to it in place of the trailer for the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. The meme grew out of a similar bait-and-switch trick called "duckrolling" that was popular on the 4chan website in 2006.

Awareness of rickrolling increased after two events in April 2008: YouTube used the meme for its April Fools' Day event, and users of several websites voted for "Never Gonna Give You Up" in a poll for the New York Mets' rally song. By 2008, at least 18 million US adults had been rickrolled. As of 2023, 'Never Gonna Give You Up' is one of the select few iconic songs to reach over a billion streams on YouTube. Astley's song joined Spotify's "Billions Club" on Monday, surpassing 1 billion streams on the platform. Despite the video garnering millions of hits on YouTube, Astley earned almost no money from the online phenomenon, receiving only $12 in royalties from YouTube for his performance share as of August 2010.