For the last year or so a friend and I have been playing gigs around the Phoenix area. We mostly do Irish music and a lot of the songs are certainly public domain (although I don't know this for a fact, but seems to make sense since many are 100+ years old). Of course, we still do come covers of more modern Irish music (Pogues, Christy Moore, Sinead O'Connor, etc).
Anyhow, we got these gigs based on people seeing us at open mics or at other gigs so we never needed a demo CD. However, we want to branch out a bit and see if we can't land a few more gigs so now we are thinking about getting some recording done.
What we are trying to decide on is which songs to include on the demo CD. We want to give the listener a taste of what we sound like so we want to include a traditional song, a modern song, and a song that falls somewhere between. However, the last two songs are more than likely copyrighted.
What do I need to do here, if anything, as far as these copyrights go? Certainly we won't be selling these CDs... we are only going to make 100 or so. However, its certainly arguable that we will profit by recording these songs since they will lead the way to paying gigs. Anyone know of any laws or norms here that I can research? I'd rather not break the law, but I also want to put songs on the CD that will sell us.