How would we grow cotton without slaves?
Kickstarter has shown how artists can get paid before recording. Concerts can be a huge draw. Free music downloads build hype for both. Recordings have better quality than MP3s, and can include special bonus gimmicks.
The recording industry as we know it is hardly proof that it's the only way.
so copyrights don't benefit artists? patents don't benefit inventors?
Patents and copyrights benefit some at the expense of others, because intellectual property laws necessarily mean violating the real property rights of others. And the biggest beneficiaries of these laws are not the artists or designers.
Chexk out the work of Stephan Kinsella in Against Intellectual Property for a detailed analysis of the subject.
intellectual property laws necessarily mean violating the real property rights of others?
By claiming ownership of an idea, you claim the right to harm them if they use their own property to implement the idea. But ideas can't be owned when they are in someone else's mind, and you do not have the right to threaten someone else for using their own property to turn ideas into something real.
if you improve an invention in any significant way then you can get a patent, something in someone's mind is useless if they are not activily persuing developing it. We have all seen something and said "I thought of that" but we didn't risk any of our capital or spend any of our time to pursue or develop it, or even bother to protect it. Thus it is not a right to harm anyone, it is a right to defend one's property.
You're still assuming the patent system has merit. It does not.
Without it we would all be shitting in wooden buckets in front of open hearths.