Spent a little while looking into embeds, as recommended, and it seems like it could be worthwhile. I tested the native embed, as it were, by tacking /embed onto a URL, and it is not very attractive. But customising the embed by using the other image and the audio will take a bit of work. I have found some useful resources for that, notably https://www.sitepoint.com/customizing-wordpress-oembed-content/ for the code needed.

Might also be worth implementing a different audio player on the site -- using this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/pb-oembed-html5-audio-with-cache-support/ -- but still feeding it the blueberry version of the audio URL to maintain continuity of stats.