This week’s features include: Chilli Beans,, リーガルリリー (regal lily)
アイラブミー (I LUV ME), souzoucity, and cadode

What’s up guys, and welcome back to another week of the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! We are now in Week 22 of Drafts so we’re soon reaching the end of our little series here but to those of you who are unaware 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)

Even though we only have a few weeks of Draft left before the end of year, Spotify’s sitting at a pretty decent place to be able to take it all the way home. More so if it continues to do well again this week.

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Let’s see what we’re dealing with:

… That’s wild

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♥ アンドロン/andron by Chilli Beans.

The absolute nerve of Spotify to recommend to＊me＊of all people a song in Andron that’s not only by the band that I’ve gone on record to say as my favorite discovery of 2022, but also a song that’s part of my favorite album from that year as well. Granted, yes, it’s on me for not having featured this song on the Roundup but c’mon, you can’t tell me this isn’t a free point I’m giving away here.

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♥ 魔女/majo by Regal Lily

In a rather similar token, I do feel like Regal Lily have more than proven themselves here on the blog as a band that definitely warrants to be listened to. One of the things that I always like saying about the humble Tokyo-based three piece, which does become apparent right away when you listen to Majo here is that these girls’ understanding of Rock is just on another level.

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♥ セイブミー/save me by アイラブミー (I luv me)

There’s just no way I LUV ME is gonna roll up here with friggin’ Coldplay’s Viva La Vida and expect to get away with it without first hearing it from me (XD) That being said… I’m not even going to pretend that Save Me isn’t as catchy as it is. The duo is 2/2 now on the Draft so at the very least they do have my attention now if they didn’t already. Huge ups from me here for sure.

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♥ いつのまにか/itsunomanika by souzoucity

I’m just getting crushed by all these producers I swear… This one comes to me by way of Yourness composer/lyricist Koga Shouhei’s side project, souzoucity, which sees him collaborate with indie artists. Itsunomanika features singer nemoi and, in as much as producer/singer pairings have become their own genre, you’d be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t sound good at minimum.

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♥ タイムマシンに乗るから/time machine ni noru kara by cadode

If there’s any group that the Draft has turned me around for, chief among them would be cadode. I wasn’t much of a believer in the past, but with now the unit’s second appearance on here with Time Machine Ni Noru Kara I have been convinced otherwise. Maybe it helps that I’ve since been a bit more receptive to more prod-based tracks, but those short little dubstep-y breaks sold me here.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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

I mean, this was a gimme week. Like, what was I supposed to do,＊not＊pick up a Chilli Beans. song just to spite Spotify? Of course not. Sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles as they say, and here we are now with Spotify up to 87 out of the 100 that it needs to clear the Draft!

We only have four more weeks of Draft remaining, which means there’s now only 20 songs left to be drafted. Spotify only needs thirteen more songs to be hits for it to become the winner of this year’s Draft. It’s a huge margin of error as I mentioned before (more so now that it got another 5 ♥’s on us), so unless we just have an absolutely catastrophic next couple of weeks, it’s looking like it might walk away with this one.

Lemme know what you think down below. Also, let me know too about your guys’ thoughts on this week’s Draft picks!

Happy Listening!