Ayumi Hamasaki Sekai - View Single Post - [A] Ayu ~Anything Goes~ XVI
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Old 8th May 2016, 11:53 PM
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Baernash Baernash is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2004
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 4Seasons View Post
Why doesn't she do 2-3 singles before each album anymore? Has that been discussed on this forum? I'm curious to read the reasoning.
Times has changed, sales has changed and way of promotion has changed. It's not just Ayu but other artists too (except teenage-idol bands and H!P). It's kinda like asking why they still not releasing her PVs/concerts on VHS/VCD. People loosing interest in buying physical singles and there are multiple reasons behind it:

1) a lot of people prefering digital downloads nowadays - most of people will rip CD and will listen to it on their smartphone/mp3 players anyway, so CD is more like collectible for fans by big "F"
2) content of singles started to shrinking - remember old Ayu' singles? Some of them had multiple remixes and 10-11 tracks at all. Later you could find just A-song, B-song and instrumentals, so if you're not a fan who cares for instrumentals you don't really need it in your collection
3) agressive marketing discouraging to buy - when they started releasing each single in multiple versions (with small difference like different bonus track or just cover), they tried to "encourage" fans to buy more than 1 version (to raise sales) but it didn't work. Fans would like to have all versions to not miss any content (like remixes or making of movies) but not everyone could afford it, so some of them just stopped to buy any version. In the past when she was releasing for ex. 3 singles + 1 album per year than total cost to buy it was Y6839. Now just to buy 1 single in all versions available you would have to spend about Y6000... Besides don't forget that japanese society is rotten by consumerism - they love to buy but they don't really have enough of pace in their appartments to keeps all the goods.
4) Ayu lost a lot of "old" fans - she changed and her fans changed too. People matured but can we say the same about Ayu's music? Sorry but no. She was composing songs, had great PVs with meaning... Now she's giving us things like "XOXO" and "Lelio" - empty, mainstream, Americanised.