Music fades and turns off after a few seconds of playback.

Question

I've noticed an odd problem with the ipod/music function of my iphone 4. When start an album, the first song will play for about 15 seconds. After that, the music fades and stops all together. I have to physically go back and push play again. It will play fine for some time, but this will happen again randomly.
It's particularly annoying when using the phone in the car. I know the iphone automatically does this if you unplug the headphone jack while the music is playing. I wonder if something could be wrong with that mechanism, maybe the jack.
I also only noticed this after updating to 4.3. If it's a 4.3 issue hopefully the next update (4.3.1?) will fix it.
Has anyone else had this issue/figured out what its all about?

Answer 1

So I did call Apple. That was pointless since they had no idea what was wrong. I made an appointment with a Genius at the Apple store nearest to me. The associate who checked me in said his wife had the same problem (and discovered it while on an 8 hour flight, which stinks).
The genius who helped me was great. He had no idea what the issue was and hadn't heard of the issue before, so he took my phone into the back room and ran some diagnostics.
He found that there was nothing wrong with the hardware at all, but he noticed an error with my firmware.
He restored my phone (while my phone was plugged into itunes he held down the home and wake/sleep buttons. Then when the apple logo appeared he let go of the sleep/wake button but kept the home button pressed). This erased everything. I wasn't worried about that since all my contacts, apps, and music were backed up on my computer.
I guess he reinstalled the latest firmware and os update. He put a couple of albums worth of music on there too for me to test it. Problem solved.
It took an hour or two for me to get everything back onto my phone and in its proper place.
That was a pain, but worth it since I can now listen to music freely with no interruption.
The only thing I'm really ****** about is that my game data is all erased. Apparently when you back up your apps in itunes, it doesn't back up your progress/saves/scores in your games. I have about 30 games on my phone so this really, really *****. I guess I will just have to replay all the levels in Angry Birds, Peggle, Cut the Rope, etc. Lost a lot of progress in Infinity Blade which is pretty especially awful.
I just listened to about a half hour of music with no interruptions though, so I guess its a fair trade.
Good luck.