m3u (or really anything that relies on file names to reference media assets) would be a potential disaster... all kinds of weird stuff makes it into your parser when you're dealing with a large enough catalog. I used to work in streaming media, including with some m3u-based legacy systems, and dealt with a pile of edge cases a mile high.

But thankfully, the industry solved this problem themselves: ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) is already used all over the royalty reporting side of the industry because it specifically solves the problem of referencing an individual recording of a work.

DDEX is a content delivery manifest format the industry also uses for this kind of purpose (sharing complex metadata about recordings in a standardized way), but its an 800lb gorilla of a format and not super consumer-friendly.

These are things that are all over the back offices of your favorite streaming service, but mostly transparent to the consumer.

This is a great comment, thanks for adding to the conversation.

This further gives proof that it is technically feasible for Spotify and Apple Music to be able to import/export playlists across both their services. Looking forward to seeing it happen in reality.

I was thinking the other day about that, sort of. Apple in the early 2000s was really into things like CalDAV and WebDAV. Safari had integrated RSS reading at one point. They embraced standardization and interoperability for many things, at least where important user data was concerned. Then something happened after the iPhone took off and iCloud became a thing, and they became all about vendor lock-in. I assume it comes from being a market leader instead of only having a relatively unpopular computing platform.

there also are non-nefarious reason for dropping open standards ( obviously lock-in and profit where a big plus for them ), one would be that on your own technology you can implement, drop, and/or modify whatever functionality you want