I fixed this problem. The problem began after running the latest update. I keep having this problem re-occur repeatedly for a while now after updates or other changes. Leaving the country, restores, backups, updates, sometimes it just hoses without any noticeable changes.
I have about 7 Apple devices. I suspect perhaps the issue is one of the devices is bumping my main iPhone off once in a while when another phone signs in or my computer's iTunes is getting Deauthorized inside iTunes on my Windows PC.
I fixed this problem several ways in the past. This time I simply reauthorized my computer in iTunes on my PC. My newest iPhone was plugged in at the time and iTunes immediately starting to sync more songs to it super fast, appearing to simply "enable" rather than copy files over. Within a few seconds i hit the play button on my iPhone and one of MANY songs started to play. These are songs that are from all over the place from years prior to iTunes even existing. I have ripped music from my CDs, purchased songs from iTunes, music from the Internet, it doesn't matter. Hopefully Apple for all their billions in worth, can create a simple log file to audit the problem on our devices and fix the issue.
If we know what the problem is, there's a good chance we can fix it ourselves and not wait 6 years for Apple to figure it out.
One other note, about 6 days ago my son needed to restore a backup from his iPhone with an older app and needed the Apple ID to get the app redownloaded. Him signing in to get his app redownloaded my have hosed it this time. I was recently in Asia about a month ago as well but no music problems until about a day ago, most likely from the failed update i tried to run earlier in the morning.