This week’s features include: 湯木慧 (yuki akira), POP ART TOWN, Foi,
Narco-lepsy, ポップしなないで (pop shinanaide)

Draft Week what’s up?! 😀 Welcome back to the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft, it is now Week 17 and if you’ve been keeping it up with the picks you know how we go down, but if in case you haven’t here’s a quick primer:

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)

I mean, ＊both＊ playlists can be good too of course… 😛

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…I’m genuinely impressed

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♥ Answer by 湯木慧 (yuki akira)

Yuki Akira makes her third appearance here on the Draft (Spotify must really want me to like her) but, in all honesty, with songs like Answer here it’s gonna be hard not to. Love everything about it. Actually reminds me quite a bit of early Kumagawa Miyu which is a sound I’m always gonna be fond of. My only complaint if I was forced to give one would be the song could’ve been a bit more condensed.

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♥ Sweet night by POP ART TOWN

I don’t know what it is about POP ART TOWN’s sound that I seem to gravitate towards. I think something about the interplay of vocalist Naruo Sayaka’s singing and the band’s blaring Synth Pop just tickles the right part of my brain each time. At the very least, I’ve yet to get tired of their sound and whether or not I will remains to be seen. In the mean time, we’re taking Sweet night for sure.

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♥ FLASH POINT by Foi

https://open.spotify.com/track/2BpBStHYBvciYyrNx1YFYT?si=8bbbec67ad634302

… Well this couldn’t have a come at a more opportune time. If you caught last month’s Roundup I ended up featuring Foi twice, once for a guest appearance in a song and another for her own song that had just released. Suffice for it to say I’ve been on a bit of a Foi kick as of late and FLASH POINT was definitely a part of that. Seriously, the timing of this Draft is wild…

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♥ submerge by Narco-lepsy

I do believe, if memory serves me right, that I was close to featuring Narco-lepsy very early on just that I ultimately chose to feature a different song. It’s a bit unfortunate in that regard that the band has since ceased activities. More so since, as you’ll hear in submerge here, Narco-lepsy is as solid in the instrumentation as the best of them. Sad to see them go, but we enjoy the work regardless.

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♥ Creation by ポップしなないで (pop shinanaide)

See, this is what I was talking about when we last had Pop Shinanaide on the Draft. Like, I knew they were good, and I knew they more than likely had songs in their repertoire that I would like based on that, so really it was probably only a matter of time. Kamegai’s vocals might be an acquired taste still but once Creation gets going it really gets going. Welcome to the Draft, Pop Shinanaide.

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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 🙂

Solid week this week. I feel like I’ve been saying that more and more often the longer the series progresses. I mean, I kinda alluded to it at the start but it’s at the point now too where the picks almost feel preemptive now of artists that I would for sure like rather than recommendations of artists that I only ＊might＊ like.

Peeling back the curtain a little bit, all the picks are essentially done, it’s just matter of me listening to them and deciding whether or not I like ’em. Which means, regardless of what I’ve been listening to this past month, it won’t affect what comes up in the Draft anymore. So the fact that it was able to pick out Foi for me well in advance of me actually deciding to listeni to Foi on my own is just… insane.

Of course, at the end of the day it’s a mere coincidence, just a crazy one at that (XD)

Lemme know how you guys are feelin’ about this week’s Draft down in the comments!

Happy Listening!