Firstly, great idea and as always much gratitude for thinking of the fans, Steve! We can always count on you for that
Off the top of my head and personal to my browsing experience:
I don't like it when band websites blah music at you automatically. By all means have an embedded music player but give visitors the option to initiate playback.
I also don't see the need for a splash page where you click enter to get to the main site and flash intros are dated and a nuisance for regular visitors.
A big one for me is the way flash/php dependent sites won't let me open links in a new tab (the current site is somewhat guilty of this). Tabbed browsing is the norm now and I'm always holding ctrl + clicking (scrollwheel clicking) links to open tabs I plan to look at soon.
As for content. I don't think you can have too much information (extensive biographies, discography) or pictures. People will want to look up stuff about albums (cover artist, special guests, production staff, release dates, track lengths, etc etc), the band history, equipment and past tours. Basically give them everything because it's not likely going to be online anywhere else!
For pictures I think it's good to have sub-sections dedicated to member pics, the whole band pics, individual gig/tour pics, etc and have them as thumbnails which can expand (nothing worse than a small low res pic you can't enlarge) into high-res pics. And let them be right-clickable so people can download the image for their desktops. Or else perhaps an option to download entire sections as a zip/rar file would be handy. Speaking of downloads I think it's still good to have previews/teaser tracks as downloadable mp3s rather than relying on people being redirected to YouTube or MySpace or slow tempamental flash players.
Another suggestion which I would put a lot of support behind is....dun dun dun duuuuh...PODCASTS! I think the PQcast/PodQuest should
return and have it hosted on the site or redirect to iTunes because it's a great way to publicise the band and easier to relay information and show behind the scenes insights into album production, song writing, tours etc.
Anyway I'm rambling, sorry! To answer the first two questions directly - flash based/graphical intensity is good at the level it is right now except it'd be nice to incorporate some of the stuff above.
