Their player is a blast! It's persistent (keeps playing) while you browse the website using links or use the previous/next buttons of your browser. It's compact too.
Is something similar considered for last.fm? Now that the player is more consistently located in the beta website, it seems like it would make sense and it would be a very good improvement. The compact part could be toggled on the fly so that we wouldn't lose all the interesting info there is around the beta web player (bio, gigs, etc...).
IMO we could lose the useless "Listener" info though.
This is sort of how Facebook chat seems to work. Links within Facebook contain AJAX calls to refresh the main <div> with the clicked-on link's target, while the chat tool, outside that div, is unaffected. You don't actually need to manually add an onclick action to every link, but just iterate through them using server-side logic.
Persistent web player