This was reported to the Debian BTS.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=311114

I usually invoke totem by dragging a folder of music into the icon or the
program, or by running the command line on a directory. Often there will
be extraneous files in the directory -- maybe a description of the album
or a JPG image of the album cover.  totem puts up an error message.  I'd
really much rather have it just skip to the next song, especially since
I'm often not physically close to the box playing the music and there
doesn't appear to be any way to skip the error message from the command
line.

My guess would be most users would prefer this behavior; but at the very
least it would be a good option to have.