[ImpactBreaker]

ayu is not available in my country, avex does not care for making it available, because indeed it would have very poor sales. When it comes to overseas fans (specially from non-asian countries), I personally think downloads help more than hurt ayu's career. I believe the majority of them came into contact of knowing what the heck ayumi hamasaki is just because they had a chance to download her stuff. I don't think these majority of OS fans would get to know her at first because they stood by moral principles that they had to buy an album from some japanese artist they barely know about and would spend a lot of money with taxes and shipping thinking about supporting her sales. Once a part of them came into knowing her (through keeping several downloads and noit just sampling) they became fans and collectors and started buying her stuff. Of course maybe most do not, but at least it did add to a part of people actually giving her and avex extra incomes which they would probably not get if the "illegal" downloads weren't there to make her world publicity.

Blaming the low sales solely on the existance of piracy and illegal downloads is just ignoring that CD has actually become rather obselete for multimedia devices nowadays and that music industry completely failed to bypass this issue. The majority of people nowadays are lsitening to music through smaller portable devices, with or without earphones nowadays, and portable CD players aren't even advertised anymore nor you see people carrying them. Plus CDs take a lot of space when you can actually have a memory card or pen drive carrying a huge ammount of them without the need of switching anything (plus memory cards do not scratch but CDs do if not properly handled which can lead to permanent media reading problems). It's just how this all evolved, the CD prices are still the same, if not more expensive these days, and the music industry was not able to adequately follow the quick changes that hasppened in multimedia devices and how people listen to music in the past few years.

I run into huge stores that sold CDs in the past and that had huge sections for CD shopping, and their CD sections have shrunk almost to non-existance in barely 3 years or so. It was definitely not because of the downloads because honestly there was no "big boom of downlaoding" these past 5 years as there has been a "boom' with portable media devices.