Japanese Idols & Girl Groups

This is an attempt to document all female Japanese idols and girl groups/duos on Spotify that are available internationally.

TL;DR: Finding JPop on Spotify sucks so I've put together a bunch of playlists to help people find new female idols, girl groups and female duos to listen to. (Feel free to skip the rambling and go straight to them if you don't care!)This is a project attempting to catalogue all female Japanese idols and Japanese girl groups/duos from the 1960s onwards on Spotify that are available internationally.In my opinion, trying to listen to Japanese music on Spotify is a mess. The automatic Romanisation/translation of song titles and artist names is atrocious (and often straight up incorrect), and sometimes if you click on an artist with their name in Japanese, it gives you a blank page -- because it wants you to use the Romanised one. But there's no indication on what that Romanised name is. So unless you can read Japanese, you have no idea where to look. Especially when, a lot of the time, the name is a translation rather than a direct Romanisation, or the Romanisation is not at all what you'd expect.Therefore, I've done my best to create multiple playlists of artists' discographies so that they're in an easier place for international fans to listen to. Rather than the same popular songs, this is a deep dive. There are, of course, the popular artists, but there are also many whose songs have under 1,000 plays.It's just playlists with artists in alphabetical order, so it's nothing special, but it's something. In the case of collaborations or tracks featuring multiple artists, I've gone by what the relevant artist is (so, for instance, if it was [rapper] featuring [female idol], it would be found with the rest of the female idol's discography in that playlist).What's included:
* Female Idol groups
* Female dance & vocal units
* Female seiyuu (voice actress) groups/units
* Solo female idols
* Solo female singers who are idol-adjacent
* Female VTubers and VTuber units, on a case-by-case basis (eg Hololive is included but most of Nijisanji is not. Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about VTubers, there's a high likelihood that I'm missing major VTubers or have people on there who shouldn't count)
* "Pre-idols", such as The Peanuts, who weren't necessarily considered idols at the time but are today
* Anything else I think fitsWhat's NOT included:
* AI artists of any kind (yes, AI idol groups exist)
* Solo seiyuu (although you could argue there's an overlap between some of them, such as Tamura Yukari and Ogura Yui, and idols)
* Japanese releases by KPop artists (and other artists who are primarily based in another market)
* Most anime character songs, unless the character in question is an idol (eg Love Live! and THE iDOL@MSTER, amongst other franchises)
* Co-ed groups (unless there's, like, one dude)
* Male artists (but duets that feature a male artist count if they're by a female artist)
* Non-idol soloists (there are just too many of them!)
* Dansou groups
(girls crossdressing as guys, like Fudanjuku), since I'm not sure if they count as girl groups or notWhile I've tried to include all songs by each artist, there are a few exceptions to the kinds of songs -- purely in order to save space on the playlists:
* Live recordings/albums, unless it's the only version of a song available (such as with Tokyo Girls' Style and Shiritsu Ebisu Chuugaku)
* Remixes -- again, unless it's the only available version. That said, in a couple of places I've included acoustic versions or album versions instead of the "regular" version
* Instrumentals and interludes
* Cover albums and album songs that are covers; although cover SINGLES are fine. There are also some exceptions: artists whose discography is mainly covers (ie Idol Renaissance), artists who have many significant covers (eg Little Glee Monster and D4DJ units) and artists from the 70s and earlier (ie The Peanuts), since covers were much more common back then (especially of non-Japanese songs)Each song is also only represented by one version. If multiple versions exist (eg re-recordings, member solo versions, remasterings, etc), the one I pick completely depends on the artist/song, but I've tried to be fair and balanced. Sometimes it's entirely up to vibes, though.Tools/Sites Used:
* Spicetify (Spotify Windows modification... thing) plus extension allofArtist
* JPop Fandom Wiki (Fandom sucks but this has been a good site to use for finding artists I'm missing)
* Japanese Wikipedia
* Twitter (for checking readings/classifications of artists)THINGS TO CORRECT ME ON (or ask about):
* Artists not actually identifying as female or girl groups not being girl groups (but if only one member is not a girl I may still count them, like with some of the YABACUBE groups)
* Girl bands accidentally being included (I have nothing against girl bands, but I had to draw the limit somewhere)
* Artists being placed in the wrong playlist (it's sometimes hard to find readings for artist names, but I've tried my best!)
* Missing songs!
* Song duplicates (this can happen if an artist has songs that are both automatically Romanised/translated and songs that are not)
* Multiple versions of the same song being included
* Cover albums I've missed
* Non-Japanese artists being included
* VTubers who should/shouldn't be there
* Anything else you're unsure about (trust me, I appreciate it!)Also, if you think the inferior/"wrong" version of a song is represented, please let me know about that as well. I'm not familiar with most of these artists so I didn't really have any idea what to pick.Please feel free to ask any questions or leave feedback! I have no idea if I'm doing this in a way that makes sense to people or not. I just hope I am, and I also hope that at least someone out there is able to make use of this project to find new music! There's lots of amazing idol music and girl group music in general out there, and Spotify tends to keep recommending the same songs over and over.PS I live in New Zealand, so even if some artists may be available in either North America and/or Europe, they may not necessarily be available here. So, to me, "are they available internationally?" = "did the record labels remember that NZ exists?". But by all means feel free to run an artist by me since it's hard to tell if they're region-locked or not!

CONTACT

Please feel free to contact me at either of the following links! If I take a while to get back to you it's just because my brain is useless.PS Sorry if I somehow have you blocked on both of these. I tend to block people a lot, so it's 99% likely that it's not personal.