This week’s features include: POP ART TOWN, やまもとひかる (yamamoto hikaru),
白神真志朗 (mashiro shirakami), Organic Call, and HARUKATOMIYUKI

What is up everyone, and welcome back to another week of the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! …It’s a bit of a mouthful, I know, but it’s the best I got (XD)

This is a new series that I started this year (catch the first week here if you didn’t happen to do so), but just to give a brief summary of what this is all about –

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)

Week 3 of the Draft hit us with a bit of a clean sweep with Spotify recommending five out of five hitters (at least by my metric, lol), and on the whole the recommendations have been trending positively thus far. Let’s see if it can keep that same energy.

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Let’s see what we’ve got:

Interesting mix of names as always. Honestly very surprised and happy to see HARUKATOMIYUKI on there specifically as a band that in a way was somewhat part of my inception, if you will, as a Japanese music fan.

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♥ i by POP ART TOWN

POP ART TOWN crept up on me towards the end of last year in a major way with the release of ART MUSEUM, an album that I have looped a significant number of times since. Spotify might have recognized that and is now giving me older songs from their discography to try out (even though I already hav-). You can definitely here the Youth Pop (specifically YOASOBI, lol) influence in i here.

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x NOISE by やまもとひかる (yamamoto hikaru)

Speaking of YOASOBI, it appears Hikaru Yamamoto (who we featured in a Roundup a couple of years ago) has since spent most of her time being the support bassist for the aforementioned group. While I imagine that’s lucrative in its own way, she hasn’t totally stopped making music. The bass is definitely on point for NOISE here, but her singing leaves a little bit to be desired I feel.

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x ノスタルジア/nostalgia by 白神真志朗 (mashiro shirakami)

I tend to also get a lot of Vocaloid producers and former-Utaite recommendations my way (which in hindsight might be why Vocaloid ranked so high in my #SpotifyWrapped for last year) and Mashiro Shirakami would be one of them. What’s interesting is you wouldn’t think he dabbled in Vocaloid/Utaite after listening to Nostalgia and… I dunno, something about the vibe of this song isn’t resonating with me.

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x 海が見える街/umi ga mieru machi by Organic Call

My first impression of Organic Call is that they seem like a very throwback-y sort of band with some modern sensibilities in terms of how they sound. By that I mean, Umi ga Mieru Machi gives me an Asian Kung Fu Generation kind of vibe, but they’re also out here doing n-buna-like guitar riffs. That being said, unfortunately I was never that fond of this kind of singing when it came to male vocals.

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♥ Continue by HARUKATOMIYUKI

HarukaToMiyuki was one of the first couple of bands that I came across when I started listening to Japanese music in earnest, and it warms my heart knowing they’re still doing their thing now seven or eight years since then. I can tell you after listening to Continue that Haruka’s vocals have not faded one bit after all these years. Might be time to revisit their dicography now that I think about it.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ x x x ♥

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This week’s picks have now been added to the Draft playlist 😉

Rough week for Spotify this time around, getting only two likes from me after getting the clean sweep on us last week, and really this is how I initially thought how the picks would pan out when I first conceptualized this series. Peeling the curtain back a bit for my selection process of what gets to go on the Roundup, I feel that on average I go through maybe ten or so songs before finding one that I like.

Of course, the songs up for Draft are curated specifically towards me, so it makes sense that there’d be more hits here than there are misses most of the time. Just that, as you see hear, that’s not always gonna be the case. We’re gonna make Spotify work for those hundred songs it needs by the end of the year 😛

Lemme know your guys’ thoughts on the series so far and how it’s been progressing 😀

Happy Listening!