Getting "error: failed to play", pausing music and requiring me to resume manually after okaying the error popup.

Thanks, Deezer, for your quick reply. The problem may have been my phone. No problem on the laptop. Finally got it to work on the phone by clearing cache, signing out, deleting and reinstalling app and restarting the phone. Has been fine since. 

Thank you! That worked for me too

IMO the fix would be an auto-retry feature, that does it 3/4 times before actually telling you there is an issue.

Also they should include the option to auto-skip on track load failure with a max of 10 tracks on auto-skip

Those in tandem would work around the issues. Personally I don't want to have to interact with the device to resolve it, just play the track or find something you can play.