Cost structures and what you really, really want

I ran across an article this morning where Metallica's guitarist was cited saying that the group is essentially forced to tour ad infinitum without the ability to take, for instance, a few years off. The reason for this is that apparently the good old times of yesteryear when royalties from albums would give you a steady stream of income are gone, and to keep their studio afloat, pay wages, etc., the group must focus on touring at a pace which is increasingly becoming more than what members of the group would enjoy.

From in between the lines one can easily find again the age-old critique about how online music and piracy are eating away at the livelihood of musicians, and fair enough, I guess Metallica must employ a ton of people and hence generate jobs in the society and bring taxes to the state. But I'm still left wondering that if the environment has changed so drastically (and in music business, it indeed has), then why isn't Metallica adapting? I don't really know that much about the music business, but one would easily start questioning the point of running your own studios and keeping a huge amount of people on payroll. Shouldn't you be able to bring your cost structure down and efficiency up by procuring specific services on demand instead of running the entire machinery yourself? I mean, if you're touring all the time, why do you have your own studio? And if you have your own studio, rationally thinking it would be only logical to share it with others. Others who could help finance the running costs, or even make you a bit of profit at best.

Again, I know nothing of music business or how Metallica works, but the symptoms of this situation very closely resemble things that hit closer to home for me: a business which is unable to adapt to the changing environment in which revenues and profits are going down forcing people to be ultimately laid off, but instead of stopping to analyze the core problems and align the organization into a new stance, the culture just drives people to continue on the track that they have been on and merely try to do the same stuff that they did before with less resources. This despite the fact that the stuff that was done before may have become increasingly irrelevant as the environment has changed.