Hello!

I go by Leap and, as you might have guessed, I’m just some Japanese music fan 😀

Longtime followers of mine would know this but “Leap250’s Blog” when it first launched used to be primarily a blog that focused more on anime-related content. While I still do enjoy watching anime on a regular basis, over the years (and as the sort of shift in the kind of content I create would suggest) I found myself becoming increasingly entrenched in the world of Japanese music.

What has since become my main sort of project here on the blog is the Monthly Recommendation Roundup series which I started back in 2018. The “Roundups” are posts that I put out at the end of each month where I feature songs that I would personally recommend others to check out. Admittedly at first it really was just a way to keep myself looking for songs that were new to me so I wouldn’t end up running the same songs to the ground and get tired of them (and just get tired of listening to music altogether). However, over time I found myself really enjoying the process and is something that I attribute to as one of the main reasons why I’ve come to appreciate Japanese music as much as I do. I always look forward to doing the Roundups every month, and I can only hope my readers look forward to reading them 🙂

Another regular music-related project I’m currently involved in is the J-Music/Exchange Rate, which is a collaboration between myself and my very good friend Al from Omunibasu.Blog. The “Exchange/Rate” (coined by yours truly) is a tandem album review series that we do wherein each month we trade albums from our respective libraries that we then listen to and subequently discuss in our own blogs. This project has been a great way for us to both broaden our horizons so to speak in terms of the kind of music that we listen to while also recommending to you guys some of our favorite albums. I also find it very enjoyable reading fresh takes and perspectives other than my own on an album that I personally enjoy, and being able to get a regular basis through this project is also really just a treat for me too 😛

The newest project that I started is called the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft. The “Draft”, inspired by draft formats from popular trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, is a bi-weekly series where I “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 the Recommendation Roundup Playlist on Spotify. Specifically this involves making use of Spotify’s built-in suggestion feature on user-created playlists and… really me just having my fun with it (lol). Songs that I like will get drafted and  go on a separate Draft playlist, where the goal is to see just how big the playlist will get by the end of the year. If it makes it past a hundred, Spotify gets the W over me, and if not, we get to declare the Recommendation Roundup playlist as the vastly superior playlist (XD)

＊Other places you can find me active：
Twitter (@Leap250)
Reddit (/u/Leap250)