This week’s features include: tonari no Hanako, POP ART TOWN,
山崎あおい (yamazaki aoi), kiki vivi lily,
and アイラヴミー (I LUV ME)

Hello and welcome back to a new installment of the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! I’m your host Leap as always, here with another five tracks to go over with you guys to see whether or not they make it into the Draft.

To those who need no further explanation than that, feel free to go check out said tracks at the place where they usually are (y’all know the drill), BUT in the event that this is actually your first time here and you’re not quite sure where to go from here, please read this short primer which should tell you all about what we’re doing here today 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 now Week 20 of the Draft which is pretty much, like, third quarter, top of the fifth, time to get things going point of the season. To its credit, Spotify has been putting in the work these past couple of weeks, but is it going to be too little too late?

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Send it. 

I see POP ART TOWN in these and I’m already like ‘that’s a +1’ for this week.

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♥ short hair by tonari no Hanako

tonari no Hanako makes it back to Season 2 of the Draft, following a successful one and done showing last season, and with a track that continues to prove me and my thoughts on the group wrong. Specifically, back when I had the pleasure of getting to review their debut EP Kittara Sora, I had suggested that maybe tonari no Hanako was better suited for slower tracks so that vocalist ame could benefit from being able to extend her notes more. However, as they have showed since, they’re perfectly fine with this kind of speed in short hair here and for what it’s worth I really do love the syncopation that they went with here with the way ame stalls certain notes which give the song this neat off beat rhythm.

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♥ テトラポット/tetrapod by POP ART TOWN

Before I start, queuing up Tetrapod right after short hair just sounds so nice. Not to say that that influences whether or not this track would have been a pick, as I do think those of you who have been following the Draft know by now that songs by POP ART TOWN is pretty much almost always an auto-include whenever they show up and this one is obviously no exception. Something about their sound just gets their hooks in me. Now to be fair, I *did* name ART MUSEUM (the album where this track is from) my Favorite Blind Pickup from the 2022 Roundup Awards so at the vert least, it’s not as I didn’t already like this song prior.

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x 0214 by 山崎あおい (yamazaki aoi)

Initially, I was just going to give Yamazaki Aoi’s 0214 here a spot on the Draft just because I did enjoy my initial listen of it. However after listening to it a couple more times, I started to realize that I was liking it a bit less with each play-through. It’s still a good song, don’t get me wrong, but it does after a while start to sound a touch too derivative during certain parts in terms of it being a J-Pop song. Granted, that’s just a lot of J-Pop in most cases anyway, but that, couple with 0214 also being a five minute song on top of that,,, yeah. I mean, for what its worth I do think Yamazaki Aoi has a lovely voice, but this track is not for me.

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♥ The Libertines by kiki vivi lily

I’m not the most prolific kiki vivi lily listener to be completely honest. I mean, if I had to say, I do like her sound overall, but it’s not something that I’ve felt like I’ve wanted to actively seek out. Like, she’ll be a guest vocal on a track on a random playlist that I decided to listen to, and I’ll be all like ‘Oh bet, kiki vivi lily’ ’cause I know she’s a vibe. That’s also the reason why I look at her music as being more of a situational listen wherein sometimes you might *not* be in the mood for a chill and vibe-y track like hers. … That is not at all the case with The Libertines here. I don’t know why this didn’t take off as much as her other older tracks, but this is an all-rounder hitter in my opinion.

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♥ やすめ/yasume by アイラヴミー (I LUV ME)

Speaking of vibes, I LUV ME has generally been a good time whenever they make their way into the Draft, and I’m inclined to continue to believe that with Yasume here. In contrast with what I said about kiki vivi lily being very mood-dependent at times, I LUV ME’s reputation of just making catchy pick-me-up type songs is always going to put them over for me more often than not, as I personally am always going to be in the mood for them. I was very close to denying them the spot because of that false beat drop that they pull at the 3:21 mark (not cool, (loljk), but I let it slide in the end as I do think the track was well-produced overall, and as it tends to be the case with these two.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ x ♥ ♥

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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.

No back to back 5 ♥ weeks for Spotify. A 4 ♥ week is still pretty solid though so nothing to hang its head over for this round of Draft. That being said, I haven’t crunched the numbers just yet (as I think doing so well in advance of when I actually need to takes out so much of the fun of doing this series) but I feel like Spotify can’t really afford a whole lot more 3 ♥ weeks at this point so bare minimum it should be 4 ♥ weeks from here on out if we’re to make it to our score to beat of 101 songs.

What are your guys’ thoughts on this week’s Draft? Let me know in the comments! Likewise, lemme know too if you think I gave a fair enough shot to Yamazaki Aoi’s 0214. I had half a mind to throw it into the Wait List so I can definitely be convinced if there’s a strong enough case for it.

Happy Listening!