This week’s features include: milkyway, 熊川みゆ (kumagawa miyu), NakamuraEmi,
クレナズム (culenasm), and Gum Girl

Helle everyone and welcome back to yet another week of the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! This is a brand new series being held on this blog that I started just this year, so if you haven’t come across the first couple of these that we’ve put out (feel free to check those out here!) and are thus unfamiliar –

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)

The Draft is now on its third week and, for what its worth, Spotify is really giving us a run for our money here.

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This is our spread for the week:

The thing that stands out immediately to me here is that four of the five songs in this selection are by bands/artists who have made multiple appearances on the Monthly Recommendation Roundup. …Uh oh (XD)

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♥ 傷跡の観測/kizuato no kansoku by milkyway

milkyway is another one of those bands that I do remember putting on my docket of names that I’ve wanted to feature on the Roundup but never got around to doing so. Kizuato no Kansoku is a a song that’s very much in the same vain as staple of the Roundup (and now the Draft too looks like), culenasm, in terms of sound and overall approach in my opinion so yeah, of course it makes it in.

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♥ A wonderful day by 熊川みゆ (kumagawa miyu)

Longtime followers of the blog would know that Kumagawa Miyu was one of the first artists to ever be featured on the Roundup. Another thing too is that A wonderful day is a song from before she adopted the Myuk moniker back when she was mainly doing more AcoGui stuff (which was my favorite part of her music anyways). In a lot of ways a special track for me personally.

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♥ チクッ/chiku by NakamuraEmi

NakamuraEmi was also a bit of a regular on the Roundups, and while there’s been a notable absence of her in recent years, it’s mainly due to how she’s been on a nationwide tour. What’s interesting about Chiku here is it’s an older track of hers, and how you can kinda tell is that it’s not as Funk-y as her more recent tracks, and actually teeters on being more Pop. We’ll take this one too. 

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♥ 365 by culenasm

Y’know, at first I could’ve sworn that I already did feature 365 in a Roundup before, but after checking back to see if I really did, I realize that I only linked it in one of my awards post for when I named culenasm as the Most Prolific Band/Artist Of 2020 (lol). I do like the song though, I mean, as much as I adore the band’s earlier work, vocalist Moe’s singing is also just amazing, old or new. 

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♥ Electric!!! by Gum Girl

So… Electric!!! is my favorite song by Gum Girl, like, what do I even do here (XD). Obviously we’re getting this one. I’m a huge fan of the twin vocal setup that the band has, as well as the Light Rock sort of sound that they bring which has been a lost genre in recent years so I’ve always had my sights on them. As for this song in particular, I mean, c’mon you gotta love that ‘Bi-Bi-Bi’ hook.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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The Draft playlist has been updated with this week’s picks 😉

I feel like it’s cheating if Spotify’s gonna be out here recommending bands and artists that everyone already knows that I like anyway (lol) but I guess that’s also just bound to happen at some point given how many of them I feature in the Roundup.

I do genuinely like these songs though, but let me know what you guys think! Would you have given this week a clean sweep of five likes too? Drop a comment below!

At this rate the playlist might make it to a hundred much sooner than I thought (XD)

Let’s see if it can keep it’s streak going in the next one.

Happy Listening!