This was first brought up in
but was mistakenly closed as a regional access issue. I’m in the U.S. and this is functionality that used to work (i.e., the Deezer Alexa skill used to be able to play song by particular artists). My guess is that Amazon Alexa has recently changed the APIs and that the Deezer Alexa skill hasn’t been updated to support the new distinctions that Alexa is making between general music, artists, and genres.
Backing up… the problem is that one can no longer say “Alexa play songs by the Grateful Dead” (with Deezer set as the default music skill) -- this is because Alexa has segregated artists and genres out from just standard music requests (probably as an attempt to drive more people to using Amazon Music). The previous ticket/thread on this noted that Deezer’s skill cannot be assigned as a listener for artist/genre requests (so now only works if you say “Alexa plays songs on Deezer”). This limitation greatly reduces the functionality of the Deezer Alexa skill (which is where I most listen to Deezer) and is a loss in fuctionality compared to what it was able to previously do.
The workaround is that one can say: “Alexa, open Deezer” and THEN say “Alexa play songs by the Grateful Dead” but that is a two-step instead of a single-step process. Please update the Deezer Alexa skill so that it can recognize the new distinction Amazon is making and can be registered as the default handler for requests to listen to music by particular artists or for a particular genre of music. It would be nice to add podcast and list support while the updates are being made, but those are the additions of new features instead of fixing the loss of features that used to work.