This week’s features include: 帰りの会 (kaeri no kai), 熊川みゆ (kumagawa miyu),
植田真梨恵 (ueda marie), Hakubi, and みゆな (miyuna)

Hello and welcome back to the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft, Season 2! That’s right, your bi-weekly Spotify head-to-head song drafting series is back for Week 8, and things are actually starting to get a bit interesting.

Before I continue though, if this is actually your first time here and you’re not quite sure what this series is all about, here’s a quick primer:

The Draft, inspired by player drafts in traditional sports and draft formats from popular trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, is a bi-weekly series where we try to answer the question;

How good is Spotify at recommending songs to me ?

In this series I will test Spotify’s ability to recommend to me songs that I would like based on songs that I already do like in the form of my own ongoing Recommendation Roundup Playlist on Spotify.

Making use of Spotify’s built-in suggestion feature on user-created playlists, we will have it gather a total of 5 (five) songs for me to check out and listen to. In addition to my own playlist however, for this season we will ALSO be including the 100 Draft picks from the previous season into the mix, thus (in theory) refining Spotify’s recommendations even further while also ensuring that we don’t get any repeats (songs that weren’t picked from last season though will get another shot if they get recommended to me again). Songs that I like will get drafted on a *new* Draft playlist, where the goal is to see just how big it gets by the end of the year.

What else new in Season 2 of Draft, you might ask? Well, we will actually be introducing a couple more things that weren’t present in the previous season. The first, is what we will be calling the Score To Beat. Last time Spotify only needed to reach a 100 songs for it to get the W at the end of the year. We will treat that 100 as the *current* score to beat for the series, so for this season Spotify now needs to get 101 or higher before the end of the year in order for it to win.

To keep things fair however, seeing as Spotify juuuust barely reached its goal last year, we’ll be incorporating the Wait List; a separate playlist of songs (max 3) that I think I might reconsider drafting should it come down to it.

The narrative going into Week 8 here is that Spotify has actually started to trend below where it was at this time of the year back in Season 1. Considering how down to the wire it ended up being last time. Definitely something to pay attention.

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Alright. Hit me with it.

Stacked lineup this week, golly…

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＊ユーリカ/eureka by 帰りの会 (kaeri no kai)

I’m a little torn on this one. If you were following the Roundup right around the year before last you’d know that I like Kaeri no Kai a lot. I have high hopes for them breaking into a larger market if at least solely off the back of Sunohara Some’s vocals which are always just such a treat to the ears. However I’m really just not too sold on Eureka here. In particular I do feel that the chorus is a little too drawn out for my liking, and on the whole I prefer the band going a bit faster in their arrangement when it comes to their songs. I’m gonna put this on the Wait List for now, albeit with not too much confidence.

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♥ あったらいいな/attaraiina by 熊川みゆ (kumagawa miyu)

On the subject of vocals, they don’t always come quite as lovely as Kumagawa Miyu’s (at least in my opinion), and as such I’ll take any opportunity that comes my way to show my appreciation of it. I do try to stay away from “legacy picks” here on the Draft (that is to say, me picking songs just because they’re by a band or artist who I listen to a lot) but Kumamiyu does a good job making herself an exception regardless. Attaraiina may have been unfortunately buried in the passage of time, with it being an album original from a release before she went and decided to be known under a different artist name (Myuk), but it’s still a pleasant song in a style that I actually wish she’d go back to doing.

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♥ FAR by 植田真梨恵 (ueda marie)

Spotify’s not-so-secret agenda of getting me to listen to more Ueda Marie continues this week and, I gotta say, it’s working tremendously well. I absolutely adore everything about FAR; the nostalgic arrangement, the bittersweet lyricism, and of course, Ueda Marie’s heartful singing. It took me seven or so years since the release of Furetara Kieteshimau (my first exposure to her) to learn to appreciate her voice, but trust that I will be looking to rectify that in short order.

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♥ 悲しいほどに前田は/kanashii hodo maenichi wa by Hakubi

I made a joke in a previous Draft week about how we might end up just listening to the entirety of Hakubi’s era album just purely through this series and well… this is now the *fifth* song from that album to make it on here… (XD) That being said, I really enjoyed the direction they went with Kanashii hodo Maenichi wa compared to what we’ve heard so far from them. The synth claps and the gang vocals in particular I felt really gave the song a nice, grand, theatric feel to it.

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♥ 乙女の声は天津風/otome no koe wa amatsukaze by みゆな (miyuna)

If you followed along with the Draft last season (or if alternatively you attended the previous year’s Roundup Awards), you’d be well aware that Miyuna was the star of Season 1 with DeadRock. I mentioned too that I’ve since gone and listened to the rest of her reply album and that I enjoyed it quite a fair bit. Otome no Koe wa Amatsukaze was a nifty little track that kinda works as an interstitial track bridging the first half of the album to its latter half, while also being a reminder that she can pull off being a Japanese R&B artist if she really wanted to.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

 ＊ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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This week’s picks, as well as our new addition to the Wait List have now been added to the Draft playlists on Spotify 😉

About as stellar of a week as you can ask for here on the Draft barring a 5 ♥ song week and, all of a sudden Spotify isn’t trending as bad as we thought it was last time around. Like I said before too, it didn’t need much to get back on track, and boy did it do so in a major way here. Very nicely done.

What are your thoughts on this week’s Draft? Let me know in the comments if Kaeri no Kai’s Eureka makes the cut.

Thanks for tuning in!