I think it comes down to the fact that many people are set in their ways in terms of music taste. They don't like change and they want their favourite bands and singers to have a consistent sound. People need to understand, or maybe just accept, that artists want to branch out in hopes of gaining a wider audience or just simply exploring the limits of what they can do. Things need to evolve, and musicians want to refrain from becoming boring or repetitive.
Like The Beatles for example. In 7 years, their artistic output changed quite drastically. They went from generic Top 40 songs about love and girls and all that, to a more progressive psychedelic sound after 1965 - i.e. Sgt. Pepper's in 1967, maybe even as early as Rubber Soul in 1965 with the sitar parts on "Norwegian Wood". The audience for that music shifted a bit, I think, and a lot of their original audience (young teen girls, of course) weren't interested in the new direction they were taking. The members were also becoming more distant from each other from that point on, and a lot of the songs were actually more individual efforts rather than the Lennon/McCartney output from the early days that their target audience was used to.
I think that it's almost a vicious cycle. A band might change their sound or experiment more, then record sales will go down because people aren't interested in the new approach, so the band will go back to what they were always doing before, and then people will wonder what happened to the newer sound.
Audiences need to keep an open mind, but at the same time bands have to be willing to take a leap of faith when they want to explore a new sound.
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