When I faced this question a few decades ago, I did what a few thousand other young musicians with good math grades did: I went into computers. In particular, I got mixed up with communications software. We've spent the past quarter century building the recording industry's coffin.
If you think I'm kidding, ask a few "internet" programmers. You'll have a lot of trouble finding even one who isn't an amateur musician. Given the choice of a living making music, most of them would have jumped at it. But that choice wasn't available to us. So we built another kind of communication system.
This wasn't an accident. In high school, I understood full well that I'd have to be a total idiot (or an addicted gambler, which amounts to the same thing) to go into music as a profession. Only the owners of the recording companies made any money then and now. The top-selling bands couldn't live off their royalties.
And if you think the development of RIAA-killing software is an accident, go to the usenet archives and google for the topic. You'll find lots of discussion of how and why this was going to put music (and other information) back in the hands of the people who create it.
We haven't won yet. The political system and the courts could still take it all away from us and hand control of the Internet to the fat cats. But we will have tried.
The main battle now, actually, is to prevent the growing stranglehold on the "last mile" by the merged cable/phone companies. The best chance there is for all of you to go out and buy lots of wireless hardware. If we get the Net redundantly connected this way, there's no way they will be able to block the data path between artists and audience.
And look seriously at using IPv6. The commercial gang hasn't noticed it yet. It provides a great arena for unmoderated development. It includes encryption at the packet level, so they can't track what you're doing. By the time they wake up and try to take control, we can have a "distribution" system that they can't kill.