This week’s features include: EVO+, The Floor, 菅原圭 (sugawara kei),
POLKADOT STINGRAY, and School Food Punishment

It’s that time already, you ask? Why yes indeed! 😀 Welcome back, once again, to the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft Season 2!

Those of you who don’t need a rundown can go on ahead, but if you’re new to the site and you’re not quite sure what this series is all about, here’s a quick little primer on what to expect 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.

This is Week 9 of Drafts, with Spotify coming off a massive comeback last week after it started to trend bit below how it was doing in the previous season. Let’s see if it can start building back up some momentum.

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Go ahead, lay it on me.

This has to be, like, the nicest spread of album covers we’ve had.

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♥ 輪舞曲/rinbukyoku by EVO+

First up on for Drafts is EVO+ here who… in all honesty, didn’t sound like how I thought they would sound just going by their chosen name (lol). That being said, even if I knew they were an Utaite prior to listening to Rinbukyoku here, I wasn’t expecting to hear some of the most lust and velvet-y vocal work that I’ve heard in recent memory. Instantly made a fan out of me just with that. Talk about a pleasant surprise.

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x 雨夜の月/ameyoru no tsuki by The Floor

I almost vibe with it. I really do. And this is gonna be real silly-sounding of me, but I think Ame Yoru no Tsuki might just be a little too peppy for me (XD). I’m not saying they’re bad don’t get me wrong, I mean, on a technical level they sound pretty solid all things considered. It’s just not for me. But like, it’s the same as me saying I’m not into Frederic or go!go!vanillas. They have their audiences, of that I’m sure, just that I am also fairly confident that I’m not one of them.

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♥ ミラ/mira by 菅原圭 (sugawara kei)

Now this. This is muuuch more my speed. Granted, a lot of things would have to go wrong with a Sugawara Kei song for me to not like one at this point. At most, the worst thing I can say about them is that their songs are too closely adjacent to yama and Suisoh but I mean, that’s not even that bad if you happen to be a fan of those two as well. Either way, Mira makes the cut here.

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♥ 女神/megami by POLKADOT STINGRAY

I’m gonna be real with you, I’m moderately prejudiced against everything past POLKADOT STINGRAY’s SHINSEIKI EP. That’s the last of their releases that I’d kept up with before having that conversation with myself about how the band is just different from how they used to be. Now, you’d think it would’ve happened much sooner for me, with how much I talk about it, but it’s specifically because PDSR come out with songs like Megami here every now and again that has bits of their old sound. It’s somewhere deep in there still, and the times they let it out it really shows.

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♥ butterfly swimmer by School Food Punishment

I’ve started to think about this lately, now that School Food Punishment has started showing up here on the Draft, but I might’ve been too young to truly appreciate SFP’s greatness back when I first came across them. They were one of the first handful of bands that I learned about as I mentioned before, and I didn’t yet have as good of a grasp of the kind of music that I like as I do now. As I listen to butterfly swimmer here again after so long, I might actually like them even more than I thought I did.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ x ♥ ♥ ♥

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This week’s Draft picks have now added to the Draft playlist on Spotify, with no new additions to the Wait List.

Another 4 ♥ week. What can I say? It’s like AI learning. The longer the series progresses, and the more I educate Spotify on which songs I like or dislike, the better idea it has of my preferences. It’s far from perfect, else this contest wouldn’t be as close as it’s been, but it’s getting better. I’m both excited and terrified at the prospect of a Spotify that knows exactly what to recommend to me in that regard (lol)

What are your guys’ thoughts on this week’s Draft? Let me know in the comments if you think I’m way off on The Floor 😀

Happy Listening!