This week’s features include: 緑黄色社会 (ryokuoushokushakai),
秋山黄色 (akiyama kiro),
ずっと真夜中でいいのに (zutto mayonaka de ii no ni; ZUTOMAYO), whaledontsleep,
and 美的計画 (bitekikeikaku)

Welcome back to another week of the one and only Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! To those who have been tuning in this is of course only the second week as you know of this season’s Drafts following the series’ recommencement earlier this month.

However, to those *just* tuning in and/or are new to the series 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 however, 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 will be calling the Score To Beat. Last time Spotify only needed 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.

Spotify had a rough go for its first week so let’s see if it bounces back this time around.

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Here’s what we’re cooking with today:

These are gonna be, like, some of the longest names I’ve ever featured on here, lol

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♥ LADYBUG by 緑黄色社会 (ryokuoushokushakai)

Ryokoushokushakai is a band whose flowers don’t give as much as I should, given the band’s meteoric rise to stardom as one of Japan’s most well-received female-fronted bands at present so… let me do so now (XD). LADYBUG is just one of the many displays of Nagaya Haruko’s strong vocals found throughout the band’s now-vast discography, which is without a doubt one of the key selling points of their music. This song in particular also reminds me of something JUNNA would sing which I thought was pretty neat, JUNNA of course being someone with similar vocal prowess as well as being one of my presonal favorite singers. Gotta give it a spot here.

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♥ クラッカー・シャドー/cracker shadow by 秋山黄色 (akiyama kiro)

Singer-Songwriter Akiyama Kiro has… seen better days, with his career running into an abrupt yet brief halt following allegations of battery in late-2022. This would be well after Akiyama had just started to break through into the mainstream, performing themes for shows like The Promised Neverland and My Hero Academia. He would bounce back not long thereafter in mid-2023 with a new single and it appears he’s back on track as being a very promising male singer, with Cracker Shadow here being a nice reminder as to why. Love the guitars in this one too.

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＊過眠/kamin by ずっと真夜中でいいのに (zutto mayonaka de ii no ni; ZUTOMAYO)

I have mixed feelings about this one. I do like Gusare as an album as a whole, and I did listen to it a lot when it first came out but now listening to Kamin in isolation a couple of years after, my immediate thought is that it’s a song that’s much better in the context of the album with how it was positioned as a sort of “break” between ZUTOMAYO’s faster-paced songs. I can’t also help but compare this to Dear. Mr「F」 which serves a similar purpose in the HisoHisoBanashi album, the difference being that Dear. Mr「F」is still a solid track that’s able to stand on its own whereas I don’t think I can say quite the same for Kamin. I’ll have to listen to it a couple more times to say for sure.

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♥ 抱きしめたいほど美しい日々に/dakishimetai hodo utsukushī hibi ni
by whaledontsleep

If the opening seconds of Dakishimetai Hodo Utsukushii Hibi ni sounded at all familiar to you, you’re more than likely thinking of a song by yama, whom whaledontsleep, aka くじら (kujira; lit. “whale”) composes/produces songs for. We’ve been seeing a lot of this more now, with Guiano being another recent example of a producer putting out songs that they also then sing and perform themselves. I mean, personally, I’m actually very much for it. I think it’s cool when composers and producers like whaledontsleep and Guiano do this. Whether or not this is gonna be a full on trend is beyond me. Like, I dunno, will we see n-buna release a solo album of his own next? Hard to say. At the very least, it *would* be a way to get me to listen to more male singe-

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♥ 瞳に吸い込まれてしまう/hitomini suikomareteshimau
by 美的計画 (biteki keikaku) feat. 謎女 (nazome)

Last up for this week is yet another song from BitekiKeikaku’s BITEKI, Hitomini Suikomareteshimau, which marks the third time a track from that album that has been included into the Draft. I mean, it’s a Kawatani Enon composition so I’m gonna vibe to it regardless to some degree. Not much more I can say about it considering it’s another song with nazome again handling the vocal department. Of not however, in relation to that, nazome performs only three of the twelve total tracks in BITEKI and after this week we’ll now covered *all three* of them. Somehow the Draft managed to single out nazome’s three songs for me to listen to every time it decided to give me a BitekiKeikaku song. I mean, if the algorithm was somehow able to determine that I would like nazome’s voice specifically (which I do) then hats off to it.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ ＊ ♥ ♥

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Both the Draft playlist and the Wait List have been updated with this week’s additions.

All in all a fairly solid week of Drafts if I do say so myself with 4 out of 5 songs getting a ♥ from me. As you can see, I went ahead and used one of my Wait List slots on ZUTOMAYO’s Kamin. I do believe it’s just one of those tracks that I might come around to if I listen to it more, but what do you guys think? Lemme know if you agree and/or convince me otherwise in the comments! 😀

As a reminder I’ll only be keeping three slots open for the Wait List. In the event that I fill those slots up and I end up wanting to add a different song to the list, I will be taking out songs based on a first in first out basis. Ideally I would have already promoted a song from the Wait List into the Draft before it reaches that point, but that’s neither here nor there yet so we’ll just have to see 😉

We got the first Roundup of the year coming in just a couple of days from now so I hope to see y’all again there. Happy Listening!