yay, someone finally made this thread 😄
As someone who followed the resurgence early on, it is absolutely the rise in searches for vaporwave/future-funk sources that kicked the YT algorithm into high gear for suggesting city pop music.
I had a smattering of city pop in my "repertoire", including Rajie and Kikuchi Momoko, before its 2010's resurgence, but the vaporwave/future funk boom def. grew that tenfold. There's a lot of parallels and inspiration between yacht rock, quiet storm (which I grew up listening to), and city pop, so the genre is something that appeals to me. In fact, Haruomi Hosono (of Apryl Fool, YMO, and other works) second band, Happy End, was pretty much nippon yacht-rock. He could basically have his own thread for how much he's influenced in the jpop world.
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I think Yuki Saito counts (whom I'm a huge fan of.) There's a huge overlap between 70's~80's idol kayo and city pop, but I tend to associate city pop w/ more pronounced beats and disco influence (?) Though city pop is not exactly absent of slow songs and not everything in that time period could really be considered city pop. I guess it's whatever has that "big city" feel, lol.