Just by being alive you're subjecting yourself to the possibility of any number of medical conditions, some of which might be caused by issues in your very own DNA! If you're truly interested in minimizing your risk, it'd probably be best for you to invent a time machine and convince your mother to abort you before you were born.
The internet is not restricted to nerds anymore. Sure, your average musician isn't likely to get a mention on Slashdot, but there are about a zillion different forums/blogs/etc out there covering a zillion different topics, and if your music appeals to even a small subset of them you can get some pretty cheap advertising. And if your music is good, you can start to build off of that.
