Whether the OP is a troll or not is beside the point, it's an interesting discussion anyway as long as people don't get off in the ditch with it. I'm not crazy about everything Ayu puts out, but it's more my opinion than whether or not it's actually horrible (one man's trash is another man's treasure
); I overreacted a bit in my post to his dislike of Guilty, Next Level, etc (I love NL & RnRC
).
As it has been pointed out, there's more than one factor in Ayumi's declining sales: the economy, changing music styles, overexposure, and such.
Although I wonder, do the sales records differentiate between in Japan and abroad? For instance, are sales declining in Japan itself but increasing elsewhere so it offsets the effects of Japan's declining sales? Is there any way to find this out?