Playing Music from Your Website
The number one place for people to hear your music is your website. Your website has advantages over any other method because you have complete control over it. You can give songs away as MP3 files, or you can stream them from your site. You can tell a story about each song, display the lyrics, and more.
We recommend giving away as much music as you feel comfortable giving. If you are an independent band, your number one goal should be to get your music to as many people as possible. People do not generally pay for music they haven't heard, which is why radio is so important to major labels. Your website is one of the better broadcast mechanisms that you have for it, so take advantage of your site.
Posting lyrics for your songs is sometimes helpful for fans, but is definitely helpful for getting your pages picked up by search engines. If you want more people to randomly come to your site to listen to music, the more words you have on your site, the more chance search engines will send people to you. Lyrics are legitimate content for a band site and if you have the right combination of strange words you might get ranked highly for the strangest terms. Beatnik Turtle had a song called "Harry Reams" and we were on the first page for Google searches on that term. Our statistics showed that got us a steady stream of visitors every month. Of course, most people were sorely disappointed when they just found song lyrics. But, to our surprise, some actually stuck around and visited the rest of our site.
For streaming music, we use a few different tools, but recommend the Wimpy player, found at wimpyplayer.com. Originally, we were going to create our own flash radio player that had features that were important to indies. In particular, links to a store for every song, pictures on a per song basis (so you can display the album cover or other pictures,) and flexible play-lists rather than a player that sorted by alphabetical order. The Wimpy player had these features so we held off on creating our own.
As always, we are open to other suggestions for good players and would love to hear ideas.