They are a business. If they didn't make money, or even lost money, then they didn't take care of the financial side of things. Maybe they didn't charge enough. Maybe if they charged the amount necessary to earn a profit, then there is no market at that price point. The same applies to every commercial endeavor. Just like startups, everyone has a right to start something, but no inherent right to business continuity if you can't figure out the economics of the business you want to build.

If the consumers are unwilling to shell out the amount necessary for a ticket to see a show at a profitable price point, then we've voted with our dollars that we don't think it's worth it.

The truth is that the market for entertainment is an accumulatory one. Each year, new entertainment is created, diluting the value of entertainment created in previous years. It's an unfortunate truth that entertainment persists because the marginal cost of reproduction is practically zero, meaning that once piece of entertainment is created, it doesn't take much to sustain the availability of that entertainment for consumers ad infinitum. Musicians aren't competing against other musicians active in the market. They are competing against every musician that ever lived and recorded music. Not only that, the market for music is competing against all other entertainment markets, which also suffer from this deflationary effect.

Any way you slice it, the price people are willing to pay per unit of entertainment keeps going down and will keep going down.

The reason other markets, like the enterprise pay better, is because most of those other industries are in the market of generating free time (time === money) at the end of the day. They are generating free time to consume for their owners and money to apply to activities to fill that free time. They also generate efficiencies that allow consumers to have more free time. People are willing to pay for things that generate time and money. Entertainment does neither for the consumer, thus the demand is lesser.

Furthermore, the cost of creation is not proportional to the entertainment value of the creation. Just compare meme subreddits to a Michael Bay movie.

I don't know about you, but I'm not terribly bothered if many people can't make a living as a musician. There is absolutely no lack of good music out there that everyone who isn't a neophile could not be entertained for the rest of their life. This doesn't mean that new music shouldn't be created, but that the bar for the "quality" (by whatever measure of quality you may prefer) of music that will earn you a living is that much higher.

The good news is that all the people working to increase efficiencies in the world is helping generate more free time for the average person and helping reduce the cost of the instruments and equipment necessary to make music, such that the creation of good music is increasingly within the purview of Joe Q. Consumer.

I don't know about you, but allowing more and more people to entertain themselves through the act of creation instead of consuming the creations of others, to be a great improvement on the world where only those that can make a living at something have the time and means to create.

For whatever it's worth, I used to listen to music hours upon hours per day for many years and haven't really listened to much music in 3-4 years now because I prefer silence when I am creating (coding).

Creation is the hardest form of entertainment to compete against and never has creation been so accessible to so many.