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I don't think anyone's really nailed the problem, although most of what you all are saying is contributing to it.
Think of it like this... Ayu and her career before were like... the wrapped-up gift under a Christmas tree, and we LOVED the shiny wrapping, which was folded and taped with care, clearly time was taken on it. We loved the sparkling, hand-tied bow on top. And clearly money was spent on the foil-embossed gift tag, which was carefully hand-selected after ages of browsing. Everything was so pretty and neat and exciting. She was the one in charge of that wrapping, hinting at the box's contents with the type of wrapping she put around it (like wrapping an Elsa doll up in snowflake wrapping paper). And we liked guessing! What's inside? It's so pretty, I bet it's something amazing.
But then she unwrapped the present in an effort to get closer to her fans. We'd earned the right to see her with the wrapping off, but under the paper... It was just a cardboard box. Not a bad one - it's in good shape, not many dents, not dirty, not flimsy. But... it's so NORMAL. So easily torn, so blah brown colored, taped up in a few places to keep it in decent shape. Just like any other box, but clearly well taken care of. The present was simply not that interesting anymore. And maybe there's more shinyness inside that cardboard box, sure... but Ayu is self-conscious for one thing, and has things inside that she doesn't want to think about. So she'll never just dump the contents out. She'll bring them out a little at a time, but whenever she does (see "Party Queen") no one likes it. So she just keeps the cardboard clean, shows us all HOW she keeps the cardboard clean, and goes on with her life. But fans want the wrapping back.
I think the key issue is "distance." There's a certain specific amount of distance that I think is ideal for a popular figure to hold onto - one where little solid, specific personal information is revealed, but where we THINK we can probably figure it out through lyrics and videos and interviews. This gives us just enough information that we think we have a good idea of what a person is like, but not so much that we can't project our own ideals onto her. That exact mixture of honesty & secrecy is what makes a public figure like Ayu relateable.
We saw one room of where Ayu lived in that 2000 NTV documentary and that was AWESOME. But even at the time, while she did live in an apartment, it was a ridiculously huge fancy new york type of apartment that's totally inaccessible to any normal Tokyo resident. She was unattainably rich even then, but she still seemed like a "normal girl" and her lyrics were still personal and relateable. So no, it's not the money making her distant. It's how much she's chosen to tell us.
Once she'd hit a turning point of trying too hard to get close to us, and her sales hit that permanent slump, she then catered to mainly the Gyaru community and her built-in fanbase rather than the general public. She no longer had the allure of relateability that made her popular with teenagers. Sales were no longer based on the quality of the product she was selling - she just needed to hang on to fans & the gyarus. So she had to go safe.
While other artists like Namie have taken a slump of this nature and used it as an opportunity, Ayu hasn't. It feels as though Ayu is desperately trying to remain "safe" because when she isn't, people react with such vitriol, and she's a rather sensitive and self-conscious person. When she tries new things, the reactions range from "Oh hey, not bad" to "WTF IS THIS!?!? WHERE IS MY AYU FROM THE PAST!!" Whenever that happens, she tries to recapture what she did in the past by using older songwriters and such, and even on this new album she's going back to doing dancey music since that was such a HUGE part of her image & brand back before "I am..." All these attempts to recapture the past are failing, however, because she's missing the specific level of distance from her fans that made her charming.
Now she does seem to be aware that fans have lost a feeling of "connection" with Ayu, and she's trying to fix that, but things like "ayu LIFE STYLE BOOK" and the upcoming TA q&a sessions and twitter are all overcompensation. She SHOULD be putting wrapping paper around herself again. She should be using deliberate & methodical symbolism and imagery in her album & single shoots, wearing fashions that create a brand for each new release, being "vaguely specific" in her lyrics again... give us HINTS about what you're saying so we think we can figure you out. Don't show us your actual bed - sing about how you feel when you're in it alone, & then put a photo of you on the cover where you're the only black & white person in a colored crowd, or where you're sitting alone in a sparsely furnished cell of some kind. Let us assign the specifics - our own bed sheets and ourselves and our rooms, our own missing lover, our own sad faces. That way the song can be about us too.
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