Personally I'm content playing music at weddings and corporate parties, but I know that other people have different goals. Many just want to do something artistically respectable without losing a lot of money in the process. There are definitely more opportunities to do so than there were two decades ago when I was starting in this business, as Michael Blowhard illustrates:

A musician friend of mine back in the '80s supported himself for a couple of years doing scores for porn vids. He told me that he was excited going into it because he thought, "Cool, it's commercial, but it's under the radar, so maybe there'll be chances to have fun and be creative in scrappy ways. Maybe it'll be like comic books!" But in fact that turned out not to be the case. The money and schedules were so tight, and the bosses were such crude bastards, that all you could do was pump out garbage you despised as fast as you could make it. Now, though, with digi-tech anyone can make what they want, on whatever schedule they want, with whatever "creative" input they can summon up.

I'm not recommending going into the alt-porn scoring business specifically; questions of morality aside, I suspect the money is even tighter than in the traditional porn industry. It is, though, an example of a possibly viable market for music which would not exist without modern technologies - not just the Internet but perhaps even more importantly cheaper recording and duplication. Formerly crazy ideas which would never be worth the cost of bringing them to reality suddenly become perfectly viable niche products.

Still, not everything will work and some ideas really are doomed to failure. I know an accordion player who thinks he can make a career of playing Slovenian polkas in bars. This might work if he moved to Slovenia, or if he recorded these in, for example, rock arrangements and looked for fans globally, but he's never planned beyond "if I play music I really like then people will like it too", which is definitely not grounded in reality.

But if you want to create a hybrid of gangsta rap and outlaw country, that is no longer a crazy idea which is highly unlikely to work. Done right it is a smart low-risk strategy. All you might need is to find a few hundred people somewhere - doesn't matter if it's Finland or Paraguay - who will buy it or a few thousand who will download it. You should even be able to make a small profit, at least assuming you don't invest too much in bling.

So, no matter whether you've got an idea for making customized ringtones for teenage princesses in need of ego-stroking or you want to play heavy metal versions of Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, give it a shot. Not because your heart says you must, but because your brain says it's quite a reasonable thing to do.