This week’s features include: Haruna, ひかりのなかに (hikari no naka ni), 林青空 (hayashi aozora), peanut butters, and asayake no ato

Welcome back to what is now the second installment of our brand new series here on the blog, the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft!

If you’re unfamiliar and don’t know what this is, I highly recommend that you guys check out the debut of this series but just to give you guys a brief run down while you’re already here –

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 the Recommendation Roundup Playlist on Spotify. Specifically this involves making use of Spotify’s built-in suggestion feature on user-created playlists to gather a total of 5 (five) songs for me to check out and listen to. Songs that I like will get “drafted” and go on a separate Draft playlist, where the goal is to see just how big said playlist will get by the end of the year.

If it makes it past a hundred, Spotify gets the W over me, and if not, we get to declare the Recommendation Roundup playlist as the vastly superior playlist (XD)

This is now Week 2 of the Draft and honestly, Spotify is off to a pretty good start with its recommendations last week. Let’s see how they do this time around.

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Here’s what we’re working with:

Not gonna lie, a very exciting turnout out here upon first glance as none of these bands/artists have actually ever been on the Roundup.

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x 木の葉のワルツ/konoha no waltz by Haruna

Starting off this weeks songs up for draft is Haruna’s Konoha no Waltz and, yeah man, this was a hard one. Like, singing to a Waltz arrangement is cool, but you do just end up with a relatively slow song as a direct consequence. Not that I think slow songs are bad in general, nor do I particularly dislike them, just that I left that the chorus was also just a tad bit too droney to my liking on top of that.

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♥ ムーンライト/moonlight by ひかりのなかに (hikari no naka ni)

It’s honestly a bit of a shame that I didn’t find out about Hikari no Naka ni until right before vocalist Yamashita Kaho decided to to step away from writing music (effectively putting the band on hiatus). Like, you hear Moonlight here and it’s not hard to see their potential. Yamashita in particular has a very nice, clear, and resounding quality to her voice. Here’s hoping we see them back.

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♥ ハイヒールシンデレラ/high heel cinderella by 林青空 (hayashi aozora)

I didn’t know much if at all about Hayashi Aozora prior to High Heel Cinderella here and for the most part I was pleasantly surprised. Of course the immediate comparison I drew was SHISHAMO with just this upliftingly positive style of Pop/Rock, and even with the way she sings the chorus sounds a lot like how SHISHAMO’s Miyazaki Asako would have sung it. It’s an adorable song too really.

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♥ びーちQ/beach Q by peanut butters

When I first came across peanut butters (through their self-titled album that got randomly recommended to me by Spotify months ago)  I wanna say my immediate reaction was something along the lines of “Wtf am I listening to” (lol) ‘Cause it’s, like, Surf Rock, but then you also have some autotune in there (XD) Didn’t know what to think of it at first but you know what, I’m down for it sure.

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♥ 追想と未来/tsuisou to mirai by asayake no ato

I think the biggest surprise to me about asayake no ato’s Tsuisou to Mirai here is that it’s a track from 2014, and I do appreciate Spotify going for some deep cuts here, especially since my own library doesn’t have a whole lot of tracks from that year. I get more finicky regarding male vocals than I do female vocals too but asayake no ato’s Jinja Hiroyuki actually has the kind that I tend to like. Awesome find.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

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The Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft, as you can see above, has been updated with this week’s draft picks. Feel free to like and follow the playlist if you’ve been liking the songs we’ve drafted 🙂

I thought this project gonna be a more contentious endeavor for me personally but two weeks in I only dropped like two songs of the ten that we’ve had so far. But how do you guys feel about it? Should this number be even closer? Do you think I should reconsider Haruna’s Konoha no Waltz? Make your case down below!

Likewise, let me know your guys’ thoughts on the Draft overall! Again, this is a new series I made and doing something more short form and for the most part informal like this has honestly been really fun, so I do hope you guys are enjoying going through these as much as I do making them 😀

This month’s Roundup is coming up next, so see y’all then 😉

Happy Listening!