[andre2907]

Originally Posted by ruixiong89

2. Ayu's tours. She has loads of fans faithfully following her through her tours and a+nation. You have to remember that even till now, she still does sell-out tours, and like it or not, they do take up a huge chunk of the money of her fans. Her fans could decide to budget, get the online music downloads, afterwhich get enough money to see Ayu live.

ALL acts sell-out in Japan, not because of fans buying tickets but because scalpers are buying it. Fans who went to Ayu concerts report the arena wasn't in it's full capacity. But she does concerts in huge arenas and she's probably have the biggest solo female tours in Japan.

4. Ayu is a solo female artist. Like it or not, the Jpop scene seems to favour boy groups the most e.g. SMAP, KAT-TUN, Kinki Kids since they have a lot of fan girls. It is more difficult for a female solo artist to actually achieve phenomenal success with the exceptions of Ayumi, Utada Hikaru, Namie Amuro and recently, Koda Kumi. It's a trend that is dominant in the Jpop scene, where female solo artists tend not to be favoured and look upon. Hence, for Ayu to have come this far and achieved sales like this, it's considered remarkable.

JE album sales are far from amazing. They do well in singles, but most of their acts (with a few exceptions) sell less albums than Ayu, Koda Kumi, etc.

And about the big female solo acts: they are Koda Kumi, Ayu and Ai Otsuka. ayaka, Namie Amuro and BoA are also quite big.

5. General decline in sales. I know ORICON would always have a totalled number to display the total number of singles and albums sold in an ORICON year. If my memory doesn't serve me wrong, all I've seen is a percentage DECLINE in overall sales. Hence, it's just part of the bigger trend that is occurring in Japan.

Yes, but Ayu sales drop are bigger than the Japanese sales drop. Just look at the annual rankings: Ayu was always Top 2 and her last albums didn't went Top 5.

Anyway, it wasn't a success (for Ayu standards) but it wasn't a flop either.