I’m creating a website for a friend’s band and want to add the facility to play their music. So two questions:

What is the best way to do this? (Downloading a free flash player?)

Are there any copyright issues to think about bearing in mind almost
everything they play is 60’s covers?

1) get them into a recording studio. Can be done for £100 a day or more. Day 1 will almost entirely be spent setting the drums up & if lucky getting the drum tracks down. Day 2 can be used for guitars/bass/keys/vocal tracks. Or, if they’re really tight, day one can also fit a live recording with maybe a couple of overdubs.
You should also allow a full day for mixing & mastering. Don’t try do too many songs in one go.
DO NOT use ropey quality live recordings unless you simply cannot afford 2 or more days studio time

2) get them a Reverbnation account. Load their songs into its player. then paste a link into the website – all free of charge

http://www.reverbnation.com

I would also have a Myspace page – it’s pants compared with RN but many promoters do still insist on going there first

<edit> not sure about copyright issues as all my music is our own work, but I have seen other people doing covers on Reverbnation so I’m sure it’s allowed

Thanks John! They do already have some studio recordings so hopefully
they will be of good enough quality to upload to RN. I like your recommendation and hopefully they will get some gigs out of it as relying on my website build may not do it. Got lots to learn there about SEO etc.
Not knowing RN at all, do they make any charges?

no, it’s basically a free site. there is a “premium” membership if you want but I don’t think it’s necessary.

If you want to upload the songs to iTunes, Amazon et all you can do that too, but I think copyright rules do come in at this point. Costs about US$20 for a four song EP and they sell at about GBP0.79 a track. You get to keep about 80% of each download.

Of course, once you’ve built the website, you will need to publicise it

http://www.reverbnation.com/chasingglass – this is ours