This week’s features include: yama, ヨルシカ (yorushika),
POP ART TOWN, チョーキューメイ (ChoQMay),
and 木下百花 (kinoshita momoka) 

Ayyyy! What’s good? 😎 And welcome back to yet another week of the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! If you’ve been around, you already know that means and where to go from here. HOWEVER if this is actually you’re first time here and you’re not quite sure what to do, underneath is a quick little primer on what this series 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 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 17 of Draft, coming to us after a fairly decent week last time around all things considered. Spotify has the momentum now. Let’s see what it does with it.

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Here’s what we’re rocking with:

… That’s playing dirty, Spotify.

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♥ Downtown by yama

Early yama tracks are practically a given here. That’s not to say she lost her edge after breaking into the mainstream, of course. Still, it’s fascinating to look back and realize that Downtown was only her third song, and it already sounded so smooth and polished. It’s unfortunate that it gets sandwiched between, and subsequently overshadowed by, tracks like Haru wo Tsugeru and a.m.3:21, because it’s a solid track in its own right.

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♥ 冬眠/toumin by ヨルシカ (yorushika)

On a similar note, Makeinu ni Encore wa Iranai feels like a distant memory, but a fond one when I think back to Yorushika’s early years. Times were simpler then; we didn’t quite know what to expect from the duo, except that whatever they released would sound otherworldly and fresh. Songs like Toumin didn’t yet make us think of n-buna’s chord progressions or suis’s vocal patterns—we could just get lost in the music. Good times, good times.

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♥ Fancy Time by POP ART TOWN

Here’s a fun fact: of the eight songs on POP ART TOWN’s Sensation mini album, two have already made it to the Draft back in Season 1, and both ended up being picks. Fancy Time makes it three now, completing the hat trick, because there’s no way I’m passing on this one either. Listening to PAT is always a good time, and that hasn’t changed since I first discovered them.

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♥ She Side Blue by チョーキューメイ (ChoQMay)

One of the best things that happened to me in 2023 was discovering ChoQMay’s Surudoi Sasakure. In a previous installment of the J-Music Exchange/Rate, it was my pick for “an album that gave me chills” (if you haven’t already, check out Al’s review of it over at Omunibasu!). As you’ll hear for yourself in “She Side Blue,” there’s something truly enchanting about the way Urara bends and breaks her vocals.

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♥ 悪い友達/warui tomodachi by 木下百花 (kinoshita momoka)

This seems to be Spotify’s wild card pick for the week, which otherwise was shaping up to be a collection of Roundup favorites. Unlike the other four artists in this week’s Draft, whose music I’m generally familiar with, this is actually my first time experiencing the musicality of the former NMB48 standout. Not gonna lie, everything about this song just slaps. I love the guitar loops, the sultry R&B vibe is totally my style, and overall, Warui Tomodachi feels like it belongs in my library.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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The Draft playlist on Spotify has been updated with this week’s Draft picks 😊
There were no new additions made to the Wait List.

Not that there was any need to even consider the Wait List this week, as this was just about as clean of a 5 ♥ week as Spotify has gotten since we started this season. Well done.

What are your guys’ thoughts on this week’s Draft? Let me know in the comments if you think it’s as good as I think it to be.

Happy Listening!