However, the abstraction level I’m thinking about in terms of use-case is “listening to music” it’s not “listening to these specific file types, obtained via this specific method”.

So I guess what I’m saying is, if I want to listen to an album from (for example) Above and Beyond, or I want to listen to their latest DJ mix podcast episode, as a music listener, I’d love to have a single app for that.

At the moment this experience is very disjointed and you’re forced to have different apps for this experience.

Its a bit like in the old days you’d have a combination stereo system with various different “sources”, (turntable, CD, radio etc) but these audio sources would be presented to you in one unified “interface”. (Eg shared EQ settings, single remote etc)

Sure some people liked to have “hifi separates” but the most popular stereo systems were the ones that unified a bunch of audio sources into one package. They were a one stop shop for music listening and essentially “format agnostic”.

For all that was bad about iTunes, I loved it when it used to combine all my digital music sources into one place. As a music listener this was intuitive and nice. (Notwithstanding that iTunes itself could have done with a bit of re-engineering).

However, getting back to your point, perhaps you’re right in some ways - since music based podcasts might not be that widely listened to (outside of the world of DJ mixes?) - so perhaps it would indeed be feature bloat for a lot of users.

Perhaps what I’m after is a more niche music player centered around electronic music/mixes.