Strikes me that you only have a discussion here if you see the words "entertainment" and "entertaining" in the sense most people are taking it – namely the putting-on-a-show aspects of music performance. Things such as: playing music that people can sing along to, or tap their foot to; a varied mix of tunes; talking to the audience in between songs; perhaps explaining what a song is about; being witty; playing the occasional crowd-pleaser etc etc.

You could on the other hand take the words "entertainment" and "entertaining" to just mean anything you find interesting. In which case there's not really much point discussing it, because it goes without saying that that's a good thing. I mean, in that sense I find the paintings of Cy Twombly entertaining and the music of Merzbow and late Coltrane entertaining – but nobody would call that "entertainment" in the early Saturday evening telly sense of the word.

A different point:

"There have been others (Dylan may be the best example) who have attracted and sometimes held attention, but were never entertaining and whose primary purpose was propangandising"

I can't swallow this. I could just about meet you half way if you're referring only to the early "protest" Dylan. But even at his most "protest singer", his songs had a lot of wit, pun, and topicical satirical humour to them. A damn sight more crowd-pleasing"entertainment" than the majority of the acts on the same bills as him. When you watch footage of early Dylan, or the Newport performances, he's engaging with the crowd, he's very wry, very witty, there's a very strong persona that he's broadcasting...

Quite apart from anything else, it's pretty difficult to discern what Dylan's "primary purpose" ever was back then. The more I've read about him, the more it's clear that the political and protest content of his songs were something that kind of went with the territory of the thing he loved – doubtless he was sincere about it, but it was a corollary to being hip I think, not programmatic propagandising.