The entertainment industry is very much a business, anybody entering it needs to understand that it is about making money. However in a lot of ways the entertainment industry is different from other businesses. There are specifics about the entertainment industry that need to be kept in mind before you get involved.
The first thing that you need to understand about the entertainment industry is that the way the money is earned is very uneven. In most industries you can have a successful small company that earns a good living, this doesn't happen often in the entertainment industry. In the entertainment business there are a small percentage of very successful people who earn large sums of money and a large group who earn very little. It is important to keep this in mind if you are planning to go into the entertainment industry since you will likely spend a lot of years working very hard for very little money.
One of the side effects of the way the money is distributed is that it is necessary to keep working even after a failure. Unlike most businesses in which you grow your profits at a steady rate in the entertainment industry you are usually looking for one success out of a lot of failures. You need to keep working on projects in the hope that one of them will become a success, it's kind of like playing the lottery. This would not be good business planning in any other industry but it is how the entertainment business works.
Another issue with the hit and miss nature of the entertainment industry is that it can be hard to find investors. Banks will be reluctant to lend to somebody who is starting a production company because they don't consider the way the industry works to be sound business practice, there is just too much risk involved for a banker. Most investors would agree with the bankers, so you will need to really search to find ones who understand the industry. Experienced entertainment investors know that it is hit and miss and they will keep investing until they have a hit. Again this would be considered bad business practice in any other industry.
Since most entertainment productions will be financial failures there is a lot of pressure to capitalize on the successes and this leads to another interesting part of the entertainment industry. Contracts are usually agreed to that would never be acceptable in another business. Investors want to make sure they get their money back so they impose terms on the production company that are very one sided. The production company in turn imposes terms on the musicians, actors, writers, or whoever that are equally one sided. It is very possible to have a successful production and still not make any money if you aren't careful.