[saltedonion]

“ Piki selects music from a database of roughly 5 million songs and incentivizes users by giving them $1 for every 25 songs they rate. The Piki interface plays a song, and then gives the listener the ability to rate it after different amounts of time. Specifically, the user can “dislike” the song after 3 seconds, “like” the song after 6 seconds and “superlike” it after 12 seconds.”

These people are training on a completely different set of features than what Spotify is using. For example, listen time is likely to be a important feature where a short time or a skip will be a pretty good proxy for a dislike.

In other words, the authors conclusions are conditioned on only using the features outlined in the article, like, dislike, and super like. And I’m not sure it will generalize for Spotify.