"Making a living out of making music is like making a living out of open source programming. If it does not pay enough, you have to either put more effort into it and make some sacrifices, or you have to play by some other mans notes/specs."
As a professional musician of the last 14 years, and a professional web developer of the last 2 years, I can tell you that this is not a good analogy.
There are many good analogies to be drawn between the music scene and the OSS scene, but the simple fact is that there is a fraction of a fraction of the money slushing around music that there is in software. There is a fraction of a fraction of the demand for talent in music as there is in software. It'd be like saying "I'm not making enough money as a Latin scholar, so I need to study harder." It's (for all intents) a dead industry, and no amount of individual effort is going to change that.
The fundamental paradigm of the music business - fans on one side, artists on the other, labels/gatekeepers in between - has to be changed. Neither Spotify nor iTunes nor any other offering that I know of out there do anything to advance that goal.
