How did you find Ayu?
I'm sure there's many different and many interesting stories, especially with Ayu fans spread through all the furthest corners of the planet.
I discovered Ayu on a Sunday in March of 2003 (the 16th, I believe) at 18 years old. That morning I had been listening to one of my favourite soundtracks to one of my favourite video games, Yasunori Mitsuda's Chrono Cross. As much as I loved that soundtrack, I was in the habit of skipping the one vocal track it featured (called
Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel in one of its translations) - not because I didn't like it, but because I for some other reason
thought I wouldn't like it. Nonsense of course, but this was the state of the world just before I discovered Ayu later that day; of course, it would never be the same.
As I was tidying my room and playing the Chrono Cross soundtrack, at some point I found myself too far from the CD player to skip the vocal track as it came up, and I thus found myself listening to it properly for the first time by accident. I was awestruck. How the hell had I skipped this track for so long? It was beautiful! I must've listened to it a whole bunch of times that day and started craving more. Unfamiliar with other music like it and not knowing how to find more of it, I started looking for what I assumed might be it: J-pop. After all, it was pleasant Japanese vocal music. J-pop seemed a fair bet.
I remember it being just before dinner time (around 5 in the afternoon, we eat fairly early dinner in The Netherlands), my parents cooking in the kitchen, me at the family computer in the middle of the living room, firing up KaZaA - then the P2P-program of choice, after Napster and Audiogalaxy had gone down and just before I discovered DC++ - and typing in J-pop to see what I could find. A host of files popped up and I downloaded a bunch at random, picking two per artist that I could discern. I distinctly remember a few things: that I definitely downloaded tracks of Hikki, Ayu and BoA; that the first J-pop song I then listened to was a Hikki song (but I don't remember which, just that I didn't care for it); and that I then put on SEASONS and was instantly, utterly and completely sold for life.
I proceeded to delete all the other (non-Ayu) tracks, and downloaded as many other Ayu songs as I could then find to add to those two I had downloaded initially (in addition to SEASONS, I had also downloaded AUDIENCE). I spent the rest of my evening, after dinner, listening to those tracks on end and browsing the web to find more information about this wonderful Ayumi Hamasaki. I had never had an artist crush before (naturally, since most of my listening before that consisted of hairy punk and metal dudes), but Ayu floored me instantly and entirely. At the end of the night, I had read up on Ayu's history, amassed a wealth of awesome pics (I loved the Uraayu ones most of all) and burnt a selection of tracks to a CDr that I kept next to my bed that night as I fell asleep.
How about everyone else?