Quote:
Originally Posted by Delirium-Zer0
There were mp3 sites out there at the time, but torrents didn't exist yet and neither did file storage services like Megaupload. Alot of mp3s were hosted on free web hosts, so bandwidth was a serious issue for sites that had them. I could download maybe 2-3 mp3s from an album before their bandwidth would be gone for the day/week/month, lol. Nowadays thanks to torrents and MU, people get entire albums days before release, and listen to them entirety multiple times before the CD is even officially out. That was REALLY rare back in the day - getting an album via p2p programs like Napster took several days sometimes, even if they were available that early.
Mislabeled mp3s were also extremely common back in the day, as data on Ayu's albums and sound clips and such were basically nonexistant. You had to download separate mp3s one at a time rather than full albums, so I would like, download individual songs and sorta "construct" ayu's albums. LOVEppears, as you might imagine, was full of wrongness, lol... I had WHATEVER "version J", immature "JT Original CM Mix," and monochrome "original version" on there, for example, since I had no idea what versions of those songs were used on the album until I got it as a christmas gift.
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Oh man, all of this ^
. I first heard Ayu around the release of Ayu-mi-xII, from a website that had only one working .mp3 link to a remix of Seasons. However, at the time I didn't like it!
Mostly that was due to it being a remix, which I wasn't a fan of anyway, and the fact that said remix highlighted her squeaky notes!
Later that same year though, the president of my high school Japanese club (basically the president, me, my friend, and her sister! That's it!) gave me the Seasons single since he got DUTY the album. I definitely liked it better hearing the original, but what really stuck out to me was the Acoustic Orchestra version of To Be. I overplayed that one. My single had a scratch on it near through the last few tracks though, and no cover, so I quickly grew tired of it.
I saw various other Ayu things here and there after that, but what really made me a fan was the Endless Sorrow music video. Once I saw that, I HAD to have the single and the album I am... (I got the single once I found out that the album wouldn't have the original version). These became my first official Japanese CD purchases from CDJapan in the winter of 2002!
