While I agree there's a lot of competition but I still think there is room for everyone if you take your time and carve out your own niche. My 2create site is in a brutally competitive niche of web hosting and website building yet I manage to reel in over 7,000 visits per day. Part of that is my site has been around 6 years so Google does favor older sites. Another piece is that my site offers a more personal approach to building and offers advice that other hosting and tutorial sites do not.
So if music and photography is really your passion, take a look at the other 1 million sites (as you say
) Is there anything that they don't touch upon that you could benefit from?
Let's say you want to do a Photography site but feel there are too many sites on your idea. What about dissecting that a bit. How many of these sites talk about managing the photos in PhotoShop and publishing them on the Web? There are a lot of photographers who would love to put their work on the Web but many of them don't know how. So you could focus on that one segment of photography.
That's just an example. I don't even know if that's something you'd be interested in doing but that's an example of dissecting the niche and picking out a piece. That's OK if there are a million and 1 sites out there on photography. You're going to find that for almost every niche. You just need to focus on making your site the BEST in your niche. Suddenly your competition doesn't seem as thick.
And don't worry about finding good affiliates. If your site gets a lot of traffic, that's almost an automatic solid income from AdSense and I'm sure there are gazillions of affiliate programs on photography and music. People often wonder about the money aspect but I'm telling you, the traffic is the most challenging part. If you can generate traffic, the money making is actually the easiest part because there will always be programs and affiliate products you can use to monetize your site.
With large networks like
www.cj.com ,
www.linkshare.com ,
www.shareasale.com , etc. there are thousands of affiliate programs in all kinds of niches.