I find myself wanting to get pupils to listen to short extracts of music as homework or to supplement practice but how....
(1) I could find bits on youtube and mail them the links, but this is time consuming for me and I don't know how comfortable parents would be for the kids to have a free hand in youtube
(2) I could cut them a CD for loan - not a bad idea, but the CD is then un-updateable
(3) I could post 30 second clips to a webpage of mine which would allow text or word documents as well. Strictly speaking there might be copyright issues here...
At this stage I'm not primarily thinking of the website as a means to bring me extra business but it could develop into that.

I have explored free site-builders by Orange and Moonfruit and found the latter might be a go-er. Alternatively I could pay a provider to build me a site but I'm not quite ready to do that.

Does anyone have any experience of this, recommendations or ideas ?

You could try last.fm rather than youtube, there's a lot on it and parents would probably be less worried about it.

For youngish children, I send the youtube link to the parents' email address and expect the child to do the 'homework' with the parent alongside.

For teenage players, I tend to assume that youtube is not a problem - I probably only send links about once a term and it's always the direct musical link.
Frankly, one girl just told me that she spends 4 hours a day (!!!) talking to her boyfriend on her mobile so I reckon her parents have other things to worry about rather than youtube. N.B. if she donated a fraction of that time to her piano playing she'd be amazing . . . . I've threatened to make contact with her boyfriend and try and get him on my side and work out a compromise. She thinks I'm joking and I probably am but . . . .

We love Spotify.
You can set up Playlists. I think you can share them but I just gave our teacher our id and password for her to set up playlists for us.
Spotify is free unless you want an ad free service which gives a download opportunity.
Dora

yes, but you need a "invitation token" to access it for free now. Greedy beggars!

I always send the Youtube links to the parents to supervise whilst their child listens to it, but lots of my parents use Spotify or they just buy the song from iTunes for their children.

I'm not sure putting

I was thinking of updating my web site with clips of students playing various pieces, hopefully that won't be breaching any copyright issues

Radio 3 broadcasts are available online for a week after first broadcast I think. They often have some really interesting music on there, so if you knew of a piece that was coming up you could alert your pupils to it. Its only available for a short time but it would be perfect for a quick homework task.

For older pupils who are getting serious about music, you could suggest that they subscribe to Naxos music library, or get them to persuade their school/college to subscribe. It has thousands of CDs available to listen online and I'd be lost without it! It has got almost every piece of classical music I have ever wanted to listen to and quite a lot of jazz and some miscellaneous stuff too. And a few useful notes on composers, etc. I wish I'd had this when I was at school. Obviously it would be unfair to tell pupils they had to fork out money for something like this, so it might not be that useful for setting listening as homework, but if a pupil was really keen and wanted to do a lot of background listening, I would suggest this.

We7 is a much simpler, easy access alternative to Spotify as a streaming music site, and has shorter adverts. I don't think it has quite the same number of recordings, but I have found it better for certain obscure items (mostly 1970s prog rock, admittedly!)

I would try it.