This week’s features include: School Food Punishment, アイラブミー (I LUV ME)
cadode, 青虫 (aomushi), and ヨルシカ (yorushika)

We’re BACK! Yes, yes, you’re seeing it right; the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft returns for another season this year! This will be just the second year that we will be doing the Drafts so if you enjoyed it last year, stay tuned ’cause there’s a lot more where that came from and then some 😉

If, however, you’re only just coming across this series from me, here’s a quick little primer of what this is 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 ongoing Recommendation Roundup Playlist on Spotify. Making use of Spotify’s built-in suggestion feature on user-created playlists, we will have it gather a total of 5 (five) songs for me to check out and listen to.

In addition to my own playlist, for this season we will ALSO be including the 100 Draft picks from the previous season into the mix, thus (in theory) refining Spotify’s recommendations even further while also ensuring that we don’t get any repeats (songs that weren’t picked from last season though will get another shot if they get recommended to me again). Songs that I like will get drafted on a *new* Draft playlist, where the goal is to see just how big it gets by the end of the year.

What else new in Season 2 of Draft, you might ask? Well, we will actually be introducing a couple more things that weren’t present in the previous season. The first, is what we’ll be calling the Score To Beat. Last time we only needed Spotify to reach a 100 songs for it to get the W at the end of the year. We will treat that 100 as the *current* score to beat for the series, so for this season Spotify now needs to get 101 or higher before the end of the year in order for it to win.

To keep things fair however, seeing as Spotify juuuust barely reached its goal last year, we’ll be incorporating the Wait List; a separate playlist of songs (max 3) that I think I might reconsider drafting should it come down to it.

Let’s kick off the start to another year of Drafts with a bang shall we?

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What are we working with?

… It’s really the deep cuts that always get me with these.

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♥ in bloom by School Food Punishment

This song takes me back. SFP was one of the bands that I first learned about let alone listened to when I first got exposed to Japanese media. I’m reminded how annoyed I got that their releases were catalogued differently after they signed and it made my library look messy. Lastly, I remember listening to in bloom and thinking ‘how is this not being used in an anime right now?’ Good stuff.

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x でも生きている/demoikiteiru by アイラブミー (I LUV ME)

I LUV ME had a decent number of appearances in last year’s Drafts, appearing three different weeks total; all of which ended up being picks, which in turn is more than likely why the duo ended up here again. That being said, Demoikiteiru wasn’t doing it for me this time around surprisingly. Just a little bit too repetitive for my tastes with not a lot of peaks and big enough drops like their other offerings.

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x 暁、星に/akatsuki, hoshi ni by cadode

Although not as much, cadode also made its fair share of appearances in last year’s Drafts, having earned two picks to show for it. Much like I LUV ME for this season though, cadode wasn’t getting through to me here with Akatsuki, hoshi ni. It doesn’t have the same sort of aggressive edge to it that the previous tracks of theirs that we covered had, and overall feels just generically Pop-y otherwise.

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x ゆぶね/yubune by 青虫 (aomushi)

This was… an interesting one, not gonna lie. This is my first time listening to Aomushi who are themselves quite new, only having three songs that are out (at least to their name) and… I dunno. Like, the beat is nice with it and definitely something I can vibe to, but the singing is just a little too flat for me at times. It’s not *that* bad, but definitely some room for improvement in that area.

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♥ 逃亡/toubou by ヨルシカ (yorushika)

… Yes, this is a Yorushika song in the Draft. I don’t know what it’s doing here, but it’s here now and honestly I’m just surprised I never talked about Toubou on the Roundup. I wanna say it’s because the version we got in Tousaku wasn’t as close to the acoustic rendition that I first heard (and immediately loved) as I had hoped, hence why I might’ve felt some type of way about it. But it’s still a fun little tune.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ x x x ♥

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Here’s the playlist for Draft Season 2! Make sure to add it your lists so you can follow along with how Spotify is doing this season 😉 We’ll also be keeping a separate playlist for our Wait List which you can keep track of as well 🙂

Rough start for the year for Spotify. However, I’ve seen it bounce back after a less than ideal week to completely dominate in the following week so probably nothing to worry about. Like they say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and we’ve got a loooooong journey ahead of us still.

What are your thoughts on this week’s Draft picks? I had half a mind to put Yubune by Aomushi on the Wait List but ultimately decided against it. What do you guys think? Lemme know in the comments!

Happy Listening!