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The music business is hard. Harder than the movie business, harder than the book business—is there a book business?—which both tend to pay people when they produce something. In music, you pay for what you produce, and if what you produce ends up selling a lot of CDs, chances are you'll still end up with nothing. The whole business is set up to break you—your heart, your will, your bank account—so in this, yet another of our spiffy Music Issues, we look at how hard music can be and profile the kinds of people who are tough enough to stick it out, creative enough to find their niche or smart enough to get outta town. You'll find pieces about up-and-comers such as Jessica Dobson, soon-to-be out-of-towners the Over-Reactors and survivors like the guys from Lit. There's also a badass named John Reese who lets you know how tough you gotta be to manage Guns N' Roses while former Mad at Gravity bassist Ben Froehlich says that joining a band is a great way to learn how to hate your friends, yourself and music. Yeah, music is hard. Not nation-building hard, but hard all the same.