Quote:
Originally Posted by NintendoHTF1242
People who play Final Fantasy will know who Kuu is.
People who watched InuYasha will know who Namie is.
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But most people don't watch the japanese version/play the japanese version. As far as I remember there are english versions of Kuu's FF songs, but in the english version of the game they just played the instrumental. And even if people bothered watching Inu Yasha with original japanese dub they most likely never heard the name Amuro Namie. Just because people heard 1 or 2 songs from them in a game or an anime doesn't mean people know their names or know of their existence.
But what exactly is the question here, who is more popular internationally among "normal" people or do people from the fandom of jpop/anime also count?
If we speak about "normal" people I would say their popularity is virtually zero (same goes for Ayu and Hikki with the small difference that only a few might have heard their names ones).
In the jpop/anime fandom it really depends which group of people you ask, I guess. People out of the jrock/visual kei fandom most likely hate all of them. But I also met a few who respect Utada because she writes her own music and some who respect Ayu because of her concerts and her lyrics. People who love just anime and don't care for jpop in generel only hear songs from anime most of the time, so they heard the names of Ayu, Hikki, Kuu and Namie, but don't really bother. But some of them are big fans of some of Ayu's classics like evolution, SURREAL, M, Boys & Girls etc. That's my experience at least.
And typical jpop fans are most likely now kpop fans and they prefer Namie and Kuu, who they like better I can't really say.
But in the end I always felt that Ayu and Hikki are the ones people (who hear japanese music) know best, even though they don't really bother for the fandom and don't know any new popular artists. A lot of people who hear japanese music know the popular acts from the beginning of 2000 and the very popular jrock artists from the 90s. So Ayu and Hikki are the ones they heard a lot back then. But most of them only know their old stuff and never heard their newer songs/albums. I think Ayu has a bigger fanbase internationally than Hikki, just because she is more active and because "old" Ayu had a very japanese sound (music and vocals) compared to Hikki back then.
That's of course just my experience, but in the end we can just talk about what we THINK who is more popular, because nobody ever researched on this topic.
Songs in anime/video games/movies aren't really an indicator for their popularity, because that would assume that people bothered who sang the song.
The only thing that might be an indicator are active fan forums like ahs.