[neura]

Complete plays is a fair metric, if it doesn't take into consideration related traits like when I love a particular remix of a song that is very different than the original, the system decides that I loved the original song and is now going to recommend songs similar to or liked by other users of the system that liked that original song.

This is another place where Pandora really set themselves apart, the Music Genome Project. Any given track that went through curation has a (possibly very) large set of attributes assigned to it. This song you liked, it has a heavy bass-line, noticeable amount of shuffle, light drums, syncopated rhythms, etc. That's far better (to me) than "you might like other songs by this artist" or "other listeners of this artist also listen to", where the last one gets really sketchy when there's not a lot of listeners for the artist.

I'm also curious how it treats listening to a track on a Spotify station that is mixed, where they transition in to and out of the track late or early, so you won't hear the full track, does that still count?

Heck, sometimes I'll get almost to the end of the track and skip to the next just because the track has a long tail and I want to get to something that has more energy, not the dwindling remains of the rhythm or some soft piano fade out at the end of a 130 BPM track that had a lot of energy throughout most of it.

If they're going to make all of these sometimes seemingly arbitrary judgements of whether or not I like something based on these weird things like "there's a common English word in the playlist title that also shows up in all these song titles we're going to recommend to you", at least a list or chart of how it works somewhere would be nice, so I can make more effective use of the system.