What’s the song of the summer? Tough to say. That fun little news hook might not be so useful in an era of fragmented, digital media. Besides, not all of us are able to take off to the beach — PinkPantheress and Ice Spice, NewJeans or Kylie Minogue blaring out the car stereo. Some of us have to work.
What’s good for work, though? A carefully curated playlist. The kind we got acquainted with during the pandemic and aren’t so ready to give up now that COVID-19 rules have relaxed. And when it comes to J-pop, Spotify seems to have our summer vibes packaged nicely in Gacha Pop.
The playlist was launched by the tech company in late May. At first glance, it seems like another effort to simply promote newer J-pop to the world at large, using the idea of a “gachapon” toy capsule machine as a “cool, Japan” hook: “What pops out!? Roll the gacha and find your Neo J-pop treasure,” reads the official description.
The idea and branding behind the playlist goes much further than simply offering another digital depot to get a sense of what’s popular in Japanese music, though. Gacha Pop tells the story of how Japanese music travels in the world today, turning what used to be J-pop’s weaknesses into strengths.
While the playlist changes weekly, the 75 songs included on it always offer a diverse look at modern Japanese music. Superstars find space on it, of course — at time of writing, Hikaru Utada is Gacha Pop’s spotlight artist, with room for chart-topping names like Yoasobi and Kenshi Yonezu — but the curators have also given space to experimental electronic creators like Hakushi Hasegawa, rabble-rousing rockers Otoboke Beaver and contemporary funk dealers Durdn. And there’s room for long-running favorites such as Perfume and Radwimps, who coexist with next-generation names like natori and XG.
Just as noteworthy is where they come from. Gacha Pop stocks songs from the major studios as well as those from the Vocaloid community, while also leaving room for output from Virtual YouTubers such as Houshou Marine on the list. Tunes created for anime make up a big portion of the playlist, as do surprise TikTok hits.
The playlist is all over the place, which is a good thing. Gacha Pop isn’t just an example of Spotify hitting on a winning brand, but reflects a bigger shift in how the Japanese music industry functions today, including underlining newfound global ambitions.
Japanese songs have long received international attention. That stretches all the way back 60 years, when Kyu Sakamoto’s melancholic “Ue o Muite Aruko” (you may know it as “Sukiyaki”) became the first Asian pop number to top the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963. More recently, YouTube helped turn songs from the likes of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Mariya Takeuchi and Pikotaro into widespread earworms — the latter’s “PPAP” even crashing the Billboard charts.
The problem, though, was Japanese artists rarely achieved longer-lasting success. Save for a few exceptions — the critically celebrated Cornelius, the idol-meets-metal proposition of Babymetal — songs from Japan will enjoy some kind of buzz, but that rarely translates into sustained success or a larger breakthrough.
This dilemma only became clearer in the 2010s, when South Korea’s pop industry made global headway thanks almost exclusively to building up the reputation of individual groups. They were helped by the unifying idea of K-pop itself — while boasting varied sounds, every group enjoying attention had similarities in visual aesthetics, pinpoint choreography and a general whirlwind structure to their songs. As a result, Western culture publications have been running “intro to K-pop” features for at least 10 years.
Within the Japanese music industry, I’ve heard on background many times over the past five years that the great challenge most labels are dealing with is how to actually get their artists — not just the songs — the kind of recognition that K-pop acts get. How can Japanese music find space abroad when J-pop itself is so scattered and the acts so musically different from one another? The Gacha Pop playlist simply steps up to the mic and says, “Who cares?!”
Central to Gacha Pop and the new mindset settling into the Japanese music industry is an awareness of how people abroad find Japanese songs. Anime — which some experts told Bloomberg earlier this year is worth more internationally than domestically — helps deliver opening and closing themes from established domestic artists, who otherwise wouldn’t have had a bridge into foreign markets, with one element of Japanese cultural cool helping to lift up the other. VTubers have become a burgeoning online force, and most of them also dabble in pop. Sometimes, it’s just unexpected — Vocaloid producer Ehamic’s “Koinu No Carnival” popped up in this spring’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” propelling it to the top of viral charts around the world. That song appears on the Gacha Pop playlist, as do tracks from the likes of Hoshino Gen and Man With A Mission serving as anime themes, nestled next to VTuber ballads.
Gacha Pop — a name inspired by a chance-centric concept so globally understood that it is now a major part of the modern gaming landscape — even echoes a formerly underappreciated strength of Japanese music. K-pop earned headlines and sparked thinkpieces, but it also weighed down other Korean artists working outside of pop boundaries, who always found themselves compared to K-pop. While J-pop never became a global concern beyond “is that what I hear blaring out of Dance Dance Revolution machines?” in the 2010s, plenty of eclectic acts received critical love and toured the world, from the internet-spiked rock of Haru Nemuri to the playful synth-pop of Chai to the heavier rock of Band-Maid. They all appear on the playlist, reminding us that Japanese music’s strength lies in just how all over the place it is.
It’s perhaps a bit dangerous to ascribe so much credit to a tech company’s playlist, especially one known for shortchanging artists when it comes to payout per plays. Yet, it’s actually pretty important that this is a Spotify creation — the other truth Gacha Pop highlights is how Japan, so long chided for lagging behind digital and streaming realities, has truly come around to how music is heard in modern times. Regardless of genre or sound, the artists on the playlist have found an audience by being accessible. Don’t think of Gacha Pop as pure discovery, but rather a spotlight of artists who have already been found by certain corners of the internet and are ready for more exposure.
And here’s the twist: This fragmented structure of the playlist might be helping to make J-pop realize its dream of specific artists finding solid grounding abroad. Music data company Luminate (formerly Nielsen) published a 2023 mid-year report in June featuring whole pages spotlighting J-pop, full of tidbits like Japanese being the fourth most-listened to language for music in the United States. Yet they also found that J-pop artists (and Gacha Pop staples) Yoasobi, Kaze Fujii and Ado had established strong followings there. Not bad for an industry some proclaimed last year to be slowly dying.
Most tellingly is that Gacha Pop appears to be a portent of outward expansion, revealing greater efforts from its featured artists to go abroad. Just last weekend, three playlist favorites — Yoasobi, XG and Atarashii Gakko! — performed at the Head in the Clouds Festival in Los Angeles, put on by 88Rising, and murmurings I’ve heard indicate 2024 will be an even bigger year for J-pop acts.
To rein ourselves in a bit, though, let’s revel in the fact that the real thrill of this playlist and the current state of Japanese music is how there really is something for everyone. So hit “shuffle,” see what comes up and see if you find your own jam to close out the summer.