Great -- so here he we are in the 21st century, with the wonderful new empowering technology that is the internet, and you're saying that as far as art is concerned, we should go back to the seventeenth century.
Reality check: you can't finance or organize an album or single launch across 30+ countries using a patronage system. It just won't work. To claim patronage is the solution to the woes of the music and publishing industries is naive, I'm afraid.
Here we are in the 21st century, with the capacity to give every internet user complete unfettered access to an unimaginably vast library of literary and artistic work. But we refuse to do it, we impose restrictions on our tools to create completely artificial scarcity, solely because we're stuck on an 18th century business model for creators that barely worked when the printing press was novel and rare—and is now more of a lottery than a vocation.
Can't really see how we would do without something like copyright.