When you became an Ayu fan, what was it like?

[Delirium-Zer0]

I've been an Ayu fan for way too long now. I dunno what it's like to be a new ayu fan now, or three years ago, or five, or seven... And I'm curious what it was like for all of you guys when you first became an Ayu fan. What was the overall community like? how easy/hard was it to find info on ayu? What confused you? What excited you?

I discovered ayu in spring 2000, just as the Trilogy was being released. We'd already seen the "vogue" and "Far away" covers and we were waiting with EXTREME anticipation to see what the "SEASONS" cover was going to look like - we knew it was intended as a trilogy, and we'd noticed that the "Far away" cover was the full photo from "vogue." We were wondering if "SEASONS" would maybe be the whole, un-ripped photo, or if it would show the photo sitting in the shallow water on the beach. It was really fun to guess - and then we were all very disappointed when the cover was just Ayu holding the photo & staring into space. XD!!

When Duty came out, it took forever to find mp3s of the whole album. There were mp3 sites out there at the time, but torrents didn't exist yet and neither did file storage services like Megaupload. Alot of mp3s were hosted on free web hosts, so bandwidth was a serious issue for sites that had them. I could download maybe 2-3 mp3s from an album before their bandwidth would be gone for the day/week/month, lol. Nowadays thanks to torrents and MU, people get entire albums days before release, and listen to them entirety multiple times before the CD is even officially out. That was REALLY rare back in the day - getting an album via p2p programs like Napster took several days sometimes, even if they were available that early.

A BEST.... oh man, what a fiasco. NO ONE had real rips of that album ANYWHERE, they were all just constructed from ayu's previous releases. It took me MONTHS - not kidding here, MONTHS - to find mp3s of all the re-recorded/re-mixed tracks.

Speaking of remixes, ayu-mi-x II NSMM was really hard to find as separate mp3s, the only mp3 going around was one big long one.

Mislabeled mp3s were also extremely common back in the day, as data on Ayu's albums and sound clips and such were basically nonexistant. You had to download separate mp3s one at a time rather than full albums, so I would like, download individual songs and sorta "construct" ayu's albums. LOVEppears, as you might imagine, was full of wrongness, lol... I had WHATEVER "version J", immature "JT Original CM Mix," and monochrome "original version" on there, for example, since I had no idea what versions of those songs were used on the album until I got it as a christmas gift.

I also had from your letter "dub you crazy mix" and And then "Acoustic Orchestra version," and since they weren't labeled as such, I had no idea they weren't the originals.

Okay, I've rambled WAY too much here. Time for your stories everyone!