I've purchased a few music domains of certain bands. What could i do if i just wanted to setup a basic site with pages for photos, lyrics, summary etc? is there a free template i can use or do i have to have a site custom designed?
There are lots of free templates out there, just do a search in Google. You can do whatever you want. Put up a complicated site or a simple site. The key to success for a site is to have something unique that gets visitors coming back to your site. If you can't do the website design yourself, you'll have to hire someone to do it for you. The main thing is to have good content and keep updating the content so the search engines keep coming back.
What Maxx said is right on. Also if you don't know very much dreamweaver or other WYSIWYG editors can do most of the work for you if it isn't a very complicated site. My favorite template site is http://www.templatemonster.com Hope that helps.
There are lots of free templates out there but music related sites (in my experience) like to be unique, but you can get simple sites like that created for quite cheap.