But alas, the thing is that you can't really "just make enough to live on" unless you are a very special type of person. Right now, you might think that so long as you get one meal a day and have some weed and some booze you are sorted, you can doss in any old squat or shed somewhere. Unfortunately, as you get older, you WILL change, you will decide you want a luxury shit-house with a fur-lined seat, or a bedroom with a massive telly and a four-poster bed, complete with restraints and cuffs at each corner. Just scraping by will become a bind, you will want some security in your life, and you will want to indulge yourself.
When you are young and hip and cool, you may just be able to live through your music, if you have something to offer the saturated scene. I remember reading how Motley Crue used to live in a stinking shitpit before they became huge stars, but they were that bit different to get noticed. Had they not, they wouldn't have lasted long before they went back to ....erm.... sucking off old men in toilets.
So, let us assume you are head and shoulders above anyone else around now, you have something to make ME (and the rest of the public) want to give you a listen and some of my cash instead of buying the new Guns 'n' Roses LP I have been waiting for 10 years to get. Your window of opportunity to hook me is very small, before you become stale, and fashion moves on.
As you get a little older the rest of your band might drift away to start families, or you might simply be seen as an old fart by the public. Your fan-base will get less and less interested in you, you may have large tax bills to pay (<cough> where have I heard that before?) Some other cunt might turn up and kill your scene for you - remember how Kurt Cobain and the whole grunge thing made Heavy Metal/Guitar solos/etc seriously uncool, seemingly overnight? All the fantastic bands that were up and coming, dropped! If you didn't come from Seattle and look like you had just shit yourself, you didn't have a hope!
You might even be really unlucky and have something so unique, it is before it's time, and the public don't catch on to it until 3 years later when you would have been at the forefront of a genre, had you not starved to death in the meantime!
Perhaps we misunderstood you, and you can read music, can play all types and styles easily, so there WOULD be a career as a session musician or with an orchestra or something. If you don't mind filling in for a jazz guitarist in a show, with no rehearsal, reading the score as you play, there will be work. You may also have to dress up as a fucking banana or a massive sausage and ponce round a shopping mall or a kiddies party, but, hey, you will be making a living playing music!
To finish here, please don't think I'm being negative just to be an arsehole. All I am trying to say, in this day and age it is incredibly difficult to do it. When I was a youth, I was definitely going to be a rock star, I didn't need to pay attention at school, I was something special, I had a guitar and could play it well. Megastardom was certain, I'd be out on the piss with Ozzy in no time........
Luckily, I'm a clever cunt, so I managed to salvage something out of all my best efforts, because it obviously DIDN'T happen for me. Or many others. And those that did make a bit of an impression and shift a few LPs, have only survived because they could do other things - manage other bands, or turn their hand to being Producers/Engineers. Very very few musicians have been able to survive on their music alone for more than a short while when they were "hot".
By all means go for it, prove us wrong, make us fucking jealous, I wish you the best of luck! The only good thing is about the march of technology now is that you can record, package and market your killer album from home in the sticks via your PC. You don't need to run away to London, New York, L.A. or Nashville and live on the street whilst you wait your big break. Use your brain, keep your options open and you won't have to take a shitty job. Or suck off any old men.
