It kinda sucks being a musician today.  Actually, let’s not start waxing nostalgic for a past we never experienced – it always kinda sucked to be a musician.  Whether it was Thelonious Monk scrambling to find an audience for his ahead-of-its-time, discordant jazz or Mozart struggling to make ends meet by writing operas for the inbred aristocracy (and, despite all the masterpieces, still dying a pauper’s death), it has never been easy pursuing this beautiful and incredibly difficult art. What particularly sucks about being a musician in the present tense, however, is the paradoxical nature of the modern music industry, [...]