[orangeakira]

I have not kept up with this thread so if all of the stuff I'm about to say has been said before sorry.

I think one problem is she finds something that works (let's say her singing a sad ballad at a concert while looking painfully out at the audience while shuya dances around her reaching to her) and then she abuses the shit out of it and does it over and over. Trust me, if she stopped performing "surreal~evolution~surreal" at concerts people wouldn't just stop coming and her sales wouldn't drop by the hundreds.

The thing is, with being an artist, you have to constantly stay relevant and change your style (not terribly, but to a degree). Instead of trying to appeal to new generations of people and keeping up with the times (except for those one or two dubstep remixes) she found her niche/routine and stuck with it and these days she's seemed really dependent on it. She seems to care more about not losing faithful listeners and catering to them than bringing in new listeners.

--Also, I realized that Jpop really isn't as popular as it used to be. My best friend doesn't even listen to Japanese music anymore. She's all about Kpop. They cater to new sounds and fresh beats. I'll be quite blunt here, Japanese music has a sound that really hasn't evolved. Visual kei still turns out songs that sound like they could be from 10 years ago. Hell I've only ever been to 2 anime conventions in my life, the last one was in 2011 and I gotta say it felt like a step back in time. I felt like I was in middle school again. Although there will always be otaku's in every generation I think the idea of the 1998~2005 pocky/ramune soda/inuyasha sailor moon case closed one piece naruto/yaoi/ramen/myspace generation is all grown up and moving on with their lives and the people who really listen to Jpop are the ones who grew up in that generation. Japan had their spotlight and now it's Korea's turn since kids born in the late 90's and early 2000's are now teenagers and every generation has their own likes and dislikes. Korea is definitely catering to the younger more urban pop look and sound and kids these days (that makes me sound really old) love it. Ayu is a part of that older generation now and if she really wants to be popular again she'll have to change her style.