I would like to know if it's possible to keep track of how many people are visiting our sites (even if they don't create a profile or join the site).

One more question...I have a playlist on the home page, but what I want is the music to play WHILE visitors are browsing the site, rather than having to click on the "my playlist" link. Then you're stuck there, just looking at song titles while you listen, but can't listen while you are on other pages on the site.

As far as tracking hits, this is where Google Analytics comes in. In my few days of experience with it, it has shown to give me as much info as I need plus more (avg visit time, how they got to the site and what they searched for, most popular pages, etc.). See the posts on Analytics for more info on this.

See this thread for the Google Analytics info.

For Playlist, enable the "Pop Out Player" feature directly at the Playlist.com site. This way your Classmates can pop out the player if they want to and listen to your music the entire time while browsing your site.