I agree this is not the music players responsibility. For example, this feature is easily available using a Pidgin plugin called music tracker. http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-musictracker/

I believe how it works is through the dbus features that are already present in most players, so its seems more logical to have a plugin for Empathy to handle this. I also understand Empathy does not have much of a plugins system, so that is another reason it probably isn't already available. That is one of my main gripes about Empathy and is why I uninstalled it and kept using Pidgin.

Along with the current problems that exist with telepathy and mission-control, it is much less messy to just use Pidgin. Or request a feature for Empathy.

It is rather redundant to request this for Empathy when Rhythmbox which is sort of all a Gnome project seems it appropriate for the music player to handle the function, so I will try to find the correct place to open a bug report.

Perhaps with enough support we can get a plugins system going for Empathy.