This week’s features include: リーガルリリー (regal lily), Ghost like girlfriend,
佐藤千亜妃 (sato chiaki), CYNHN, and Okayuka

Iiiit’s Draft week! 😛 Welcome back, as always, to the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft. The first week of the new month will be Week 16 of Drafts, so we’re right in the thick of it already, but if in case you’re finding yourself here for the first time 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)

Not gonna lie, I’ve been getting my butt kicked (lol) these past couple of weeks with all these banger recs from Spotify so if you’ve been rooting for it since the start of the series, rejoice 😀

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Let’s see what I’m dealing with this time around:

… Getting Sato Chiaki in here is just unfair.

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♥ 天使と悪魔/tenshi to akuma by リーガルリリー (regal lily)

While the band has always had it’s own cult following, Regal Lily has since had a massive glow up in large part due to their involvement with 86 -EIGHTYSIX- as one of the most anticipated anime adaptations in recent memory. I’ve always described the band as having a good understanding of Rock beyond what their looks would suggest and that remains to be true with Tenshi to Akuma here.

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x 光線/kousen by Ghost like girlfriend

The immediate thought I had when I queued up Kousen for the first time was that Ghost like girlfriend’s Okabayashi Kenshou had somehwat of a similar cadence (if at least for the opening couple of lines of the song) to Hoshino Gen which… I don’t really mind, rather if I had to say I actually like Hoshino Gen’s singing, but the instrumentation here unlike Hoshino’s isn’t doing it for me.

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♥ STAR by 佐藤千亜妃 (sato chiaki)

If I’m being completely honest, and this might come as a shock to some of you, I actually didn’t like Sato Chiaki’s PLANET all that much when it first came out. I thought that the drum work was just a touch too busy for my liking across all of the tracks. The album grew on me over time though, and STAR was one of the first few songs on it that I liked as a result. And, well, I can’t not love Sato’s singing.

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♥ 水生/suisei by CYNHN

It’s a shame CYNHN aren’t as popular as I would like them to be, at least at the moment, as I do think they’ve done great work as a more… vocal-oriented Alt Idol group with a Youth Pop sound, though I have to wonder too how much the distinction of being a vocal unit vs being an idol group muddied what exactly they were going for. Regardless, I’ve yet to hear a song by them that I didn’t like.

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♥ 太陽があるかぎり/taiyou ga arukagiri by Okayuka

Yeah… it might be a wrap. Like, going by the past couple weeks of Draft, it seems as though Spotify has figured out that the highest probability of a song getting liked by me is if it’s a vibe-y AcoGui kind of track by a S/SW-type (lol) artist, which is pretty much exactly what Taiyou ga Arukagiri is. Never had the chance to listen to her songs prior but suffice for it to say, I’ll be keeping an eye out for Okayuka.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ x ♥ ♥ ♥

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

It hasn’t been around for nearly as long as the Roundup, but I do find it fascinating how varied the artists here on the Draft have already started being in comparison. At the very least, I didn’t expect Spotify to bring me artists with less than a 1000 monthly listeners like Okayuka here from this week for example. Really what I’ve been impressed with the most over the course of this series.

Lemme know if you guys think the same down in the comments! Likewise, let me know too which songs you also liked this week!

Happy Listening!