Many of my friends are professional musicians, just like my saxophonist grandfather. It’s a tough life. For all but the top few, it means barely scraping by, in exchange for opportunities to do what they really love – opportunities that are diminishing year by year. Musicians inhabit the same world we do, however, and that means they have all sorts of digital connections.
In fact, they’re more likely than most to use mobile banking, so they can deposit checks from their gigs instantly. They pay their impatient bandmates via PayPal or Venmo. Ditto for social media… Facebook and Twitter have become the most important means of advertising upcoming shows. But since the life is hard, and many musicians tend to be… shall we say, a little too fun-loving and irresponsible… they often die relatively young.