Seems like a very tough business to be in. Guess, how do upcoming bands manage to make it through given that most people on the band are pretty much committed to it full time.
Most bands/artists work 40 hour weeks at real jobs. There are very few independent artists that do well enough to play music full time. If you can, it means you're touring constantly.
I would not consider this a business. In fact, the drive to monetize art is at the root of many problems with copyright expansion, culture privatization, and art quality.
The usual argument is either through patronage/sponsorship by some entity with the money to spare that enjoys their art, or by working in another field and making their art essentially as a hobby.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a much more complicated question, and I suspect we'd have a lot less technically skilled artworks if there was no way for an artist to develop those skills in their primary profession.
Sponsorship and patronage may be the way to go, but that risks the possibility of discouraging artists from producing any works that may offend their sponsor. The similarity to academia with grant funding and tenured professorship is quite clear.
What is probably a novel approach is essentially the pay-whatever-you-like, or "distributed patronage" movements that have been occurring more and more recently. The problem then is shifted to gaining popularity/mind-share sufficient to fund the artist.