As part of any design process the users themselves must be involved and ideally get the final say, because at the end of the day they are the ones who are going to be using the site not the designer (or programmer) let alone the art critics here.
So ask the forum users.. do they like it?
If the forum really takes off then there may be a good case for including a chatroom, though these can be more trouble than they are worth to monitor, use a lot of server resources and there is as of yet no legitamate way of monatising them directly short of requiring subscription.
Music is also an addition that is often overlooked with forums, users tend to type faster as a result posting more often and generating more pageviews and that's useful if you carry advertising.
Plus if the player opens in a seperate small window it effectively anchors them to site wherever else they might go on the web. More so if it also displays an RSS feed of latest forum posts or the users can interact with the playlist, suggesting new tracks or voting up/down the existing ones.
I hope you got it.
