Also, artist and dev here.
I don't agree.
First, ideas are not copyrighted anyway. Second, you are both vague about those "different ways" of earning. Please expand on that.
Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over. Unless you are making physical media, your products are your ideas.
It’s a tradeoff, not a cure for problems artists face. The current system favors wealthy institutions over artists. No one is willing to donate to a giant record company but fans of the work will readily give money to the artist just because they like them. Patronage is a better system for artists.
None of those scale. I pointed this out elsewhere, but how much money would a creator on Patreon make if all creators were on Patreon, hoping to make at least $1 per month per follower? Musicians alone would push me into the hundreds of dollars (which really means a vast majority of musicians would make nothing from me; less than they're getting via Spotify).
How much are you willing to pay for tickets to the 20th tour in a week that's in your area? For their merch? As for myself, precious little. Probably not enough to even cover their tour costs, let alone the cost of producing the music (and merch) in the first place.
> Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over.
Patents and copyrights make it practical to cover the costs of realizing those ideas in the first place. Ideas aren't worth anything until they're realized, be it in writing for a book, or a performance for a song.
Books often take a minimum of 6 months of full time effort to produce. There's multiple people involved - the writer, the editor, the proofreader, the typesetter. How do they pay for it if they can't make any money from actually selling the book?
Music takes weeks or months of effort in a studio to produce. How do you recoup those costs if you can't sell the output?
Same as it is currently and ever was.
The main point is that every avenue of monetizing art is create something that isn't your art that is scarce and then sell that. Why not just have a system where you can make the art itself scarce?