This week’s features include: にしな (nishina), the peggies, なみだ藍 (namida ai),
植田真理恵 (ueda marie), and Litone of us

This is it. The penultimate week of the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! In a journey that seemed like it started just yesterday, we are now in the second to the last week before we do our final tally. But before we get into all that, if this is actually your first time here and aren’t quite sure what you just walked into 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)

This is Week 25 of Drafts and, I gotta be honest, starting to feel a little nervous (lol)

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*inhales deeply* Alright, hit me.

Hmm. Ngl… I don’t know that to feel about this one.

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♥ 夜間飛行/yakan hikou by nishina

nishina was one of the first artists to get featured on the Roundup. Despite that, I’ve admittedly done a horrible job keeping up with her releases since then, even though I keep bringing her up whenever I talk about PLUSONICA (lol). It’s time to make amends, and as it stands I have some catching up to do with her discography, with Yakan Hikou being a pleasant reminder as to why I need to.

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x アネモネ/anemone by the peggies

This is gonna be a weird take from me, and while I’m all for pouring one out for the peggies as another OG Roundup staple and really just band that’s very near and dear to my heart, if I’m being completely honest Anemone‘s not the sound I enjoy the most from them. I’ve always preferred the band’s more fun and lighthearted approach (a la Centimeter) so I’m gonna have to pass on this one.

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x ジオラマ/diorama by なみだ藍 (namida ai)

First time coming across Namida Ai here and… this is one of those tough ones where, I like what they’re going for with Diorama here and some parts like the way she opens up the verse I thought sounded really nice. But overall I felt the delivery wasn’t my style. In particular I wasn’t all that fond of how she sings the chorus. Things that get better over time though so hope to see her again here.

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♥ いいこのバースデーソング/ii kono birthday song by 植田真理恵 (ueda marie)

This is something I think about whenever I think about Ieiri Leo too where I feel like I might have been just a little too young (lol) to even begin to appreciate Ueda Marie’s greatness when I first started seeing her name on the Internet. I clearly missed out on a good number of years listening to her music as a result of that. I do love her voice though so yeah, let’s get Ii Kono Birthday Song in here.

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♥ ノスタルジア/nostalgia by Litone of us

Boy did Spotify dig deep for this one. Litone of us has some of the least amount of monthly listeners that I’ve seen on this service. Granted, a lot of that has to do withe fact that the band appears to no longer be making music. As it tends to be the case, it’s quite a shame considering how promising they sound in Nostalgia here. Really like the guitars especially. I’m taking this one sure.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ x x ♥ ♥

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This week’s picks have been added to the Draft playlist on Spotify 🙂

Man, You can’t script this. 97 now out of 100 to clear. It’s literally gonna come down to the last five songs remaining in the Draft pool. Like, when I first conceptualized this series, I was thinking whether or not doing it bi-weekly with five songs a pop was even gonna be enough to facilitate this whole thing but somehow it ended up being just the right amount. Absolutely incredible.

Lemme know what you guys think of this week’s Draft down in the comments!

Three strikes and it’s literally out for Spotify in the upcoming final Draft week of the season. My palms are sweating just thinking about it (XD)

Happy Listening!