This week’s features include: The 118’s, Chima, アイラヴミー (I LUV ME),
souzoucity, and brains™

That’s right, we’re back now with Week 10 of the one and only Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! Things are definitely heating up now with things going very much in favor of everyone’s beloved music streaming service, so if you haven’t been keeping up or this series is actually new to you ー

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 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)

Time to kick things off for May!

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Staring with:

Only one name there that I remember has been on the Roundup before so should be a good one.

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♥ Perfect Crime, by THE 118’s

This is one of those songs again where I had to check whether or not I already featured it in a previous Roundup as I could’ve sworn I did, but it turns out I hadn’t (I ended up featuring room instead, which is also a solid song in its own right no doubt). The 118’s is one of those bands that has yet to really take off, but I do love the energy that their songs like Perfect Crime here has.

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♥ 戯言/zaregoto by Chima

Something that I found out about myself over the course of doing the Drafts which surprised even me was that I feel like I tend to be a bit ballad averse when it comes to female vocals specifically. At the very least I think I lean towards a very specific vocal quality when it comes to these kinds of songs and Chima’s in particular absolutely just sends me after hearing it here for Zaregoto.

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♥ 朝焼け/asayake by アイラヴミー (I LUV ME)

Back in March, Al and I did a set of Exchange/Rate album reviews pertaining to singer and composer pairings, and these next three songs up for Draft I reckon should be indicative of how much of this particular configuration I really do listen to in my own time if Spotify’s out here getting me to listen to more of ’em. I LUV ME’s Asayake has a neat House-y kind of flow to it that’s just my vibe.

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♥ 愛語りな一手/aikatarinai te by souzoucity feat. 相沢 (aizawa)

By comparison souzoucity comes with what would be the more traditional Youth Pop type of sound with Aikatarinai te here for the most part, barring a rather old school sounding chorus line which I thought was a peculiar choice. Guest vocalist Aizawa makes it work with her remarkably controlled singing. interesting to note is that she has been the featured voice for a number of other composers too.

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♥ 回想列車/kaisou ressha by brains™ feat. 人体模型ちゃん (jindaimokei-chan)

Another ballad-y kind of track, this time around from the quirky brains™ who seems to be quite the character. Though I say that, their composition work (if only for Kaisou Ressha here) might actually be more tame than you would expect it to be otherwise given how they present themselves. Again another track that really works because of the vocals, so credit to Jindamokei-chan for that as well.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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The Draft Playlist over on Spotify has been updated with this week’s picks 😀

What can I say, Spotify kicked my butt this week (XD). This was a really good week of recommendations. Not much I can do about that other than to take my beating (lol) and enjoy the songs I was given.

Hats off to the algorithm this time around for nailing the Draft picks, at least in terms of bringing me stuff that I like, but what do you guys think? Lemme know down in the comments which ones you liked most!

Happy Listening!