This week’s features include: edda, 青山幸子 (aoyama sachiko), YMB
宇宙まお (uchu mao), and DADARAY

Hello (!!) and welcome back to another week of the one and only Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! This is Week 15 as you saw there on the header so if you’ve been keeping up with this series you should have a pretty good grasp of what we’re doing here already. To those of you who only happened to stumble upon this post however and want to know what it’s all about 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)

Spotify has already gone up to 54 since the last Draft Week so in terms of progress it actually did pretty well in the first half of the year. Let’s see if it can keep up the pace for the latter half of 2023.

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Next up we have:

I mean, it’s a little unfair when Aoyama Sachiko and DADARAY is automatic +2, lol

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x 雨の街/ame no machi by edda

edda’s Ame no Machi is a good example of a song that has some things that I like (in this case the vocal quality of edda’s singing), which is just overshadowed by things that I wasn’t really feeling while I was listening to it. Like, I wasn’t particularly fond of this sort of theatrical escalation in the chorus that kinda just didn’t flow well with the rest of the song. Not gonna cut it for me, but this puts her on my radar.

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♥ PANORAMA by 青山幸子 (aoyama sachiko)

negoto is a band that’s very near and dear to my heart, as some of you might already know considering how I wrote an entire feature piece about their final album. Vocalist Aoyama Sachiko’s solo venture is so far very much criminally under-heard and Highlight in turn was a very underrated release. Literally every song on it is a banger, and PANORAMA is of course no exception. Of course I’m taking this.

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♥ 君が一番/kimi ga ichiban by YMB

While some of you might see me as a Japanese Alt Rock or even a Math Rock guy based on the bands I’ve featured as part of the Roundup, I do listen to all kinds, and sometimes the simple stuff can get me going all the same. Wasn’t even expecting to like YMB’s Kimi ga Ichiban here as much as I did, but how can you not when it’s such a light and heart-lifting little number.

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♥ 潮騒/shiosai by 宇宙まお (uchu mao)

Uchu Mao gets another crack to be part of the Draft here and, so far everyone who “failed” to get a pick from me in their first go around have all since done well on the second chance opportunity (lol) and I’m pleased to announce that that continues to be true with Uchu Mao. Shiosai here was actually very reminiscent of suneohair, which is always a good sound in my book.

♥ Ordinary days by DADARAY

I’ve resolved myself to the fact that there’s a good possibility that all of the songs on DADARAY’s Gala album will end up on the Draft and I’m just gonna end up liking each one of them as they come along my way. This is, what, 3 out of 13 now? We got time (XD) Outside of that, I mean, what else can be said here? Ordinary days is just a fun track from what has since proved to be a fun album.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

x ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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This week’s picks have now been added to the Draft playlist over on Spotify 😀

That’s 58 out of a 100 now so Spotify’s definitely on track to clear barring some pretty bad weeks which I guess is within the realm of possibility. Maybe I set the bar too low and this becomes an easy victory for everyone’s favorite music streaming platform? We’ll just have to wait and see 😛

All that aside we got another good week of picks. Lemme know down in the comments if any caught your attention as well as they did mine!

Happy Listening!