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Ayu was always a very fashionable and social teenager though. Add that to her appearance, and it's no wonder someone like Max would go through the trouble of getting Ayu to a national audience.
Let's compare Suzuki Ami here. Her entire second album was autotuned to (poorly) mask how bad her singing was. It still sold like 1.7 million copies. She just had the image.
I think Utada had also mentioned something similar to the start of her career, that it was far easier for her to break into music than it would have been for her to do what she wanted to do: be a teacher. She was the daughter of two known musicians. It was an easy cash grab to dress her up and have her bounce around for four minutes in front of a camera.
One thing I'm not sure many of you may have noticed about Ayu's career: the vast majority of it has been centered around her image. Rewatch her PVs. Andrenekoi has made the point before that she's been more artistic in her later years, and I think there's some actual truth to that. A lot of her first 10-15 years as an artist was centered around her beauty, her fashion sense, etc.
So, I genuinely don't think this was a romance thing. I think Ayu was pretty, friendly, fashionable. It was easy to get her popular. I mean, look at how Kuu's career took off after avex told her she was a bop and she completely changed her lifestyle and appearance to be more appealing to people.
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