I claim that without intellectual property the average person would have significantly more material wealth, the cost of living would be lower, and it would be much easier to maintain a living off of patronage than it is today.

My personal long term life goal is to understand how to reduce the marginal cost of supporting a human life to zero, so "we can have socialism for free" as I sometimes say. This necessarily requires that we eliminate artificially inflated costs, which is what intellectual property is. It requires other things, including more automation, but that will come. The issue is that more automation WITH intellectual property law means the wealthy of today will maintain their power over the poor tomorrow, continuing to artificially inflate prices for their own profits at the expense of average people. I believe that would be much more difficult to do if there were no intellectual property protections.

But frankly, and with no offense to musicians out here, nobody is entitled to their business model working. Some things can make sustainable living, some can't. Turning otherwise infeasible business models into working ones with regulation is something that should be done with care, and should be done to benefit society, not individuals.

- Increasing technology (eg: there is much less need for certain careers. An example is the local mid-grade demo studio; these have largely closed with computers able to easily exceed the old demo studio's quality)

- Corporate homogenization. In the 1990s, radio stations merged and became more national. This resulted in stations paying less attention to local markets. The same can be said for record labels. The same can be said for local music venues, which in some places are also in decline. (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/09/the-slow-deat...) Ergo: there is less room for "regional hits" and regional music scenes.

- A huge increase in entertainment choice, lowering overall demand.

- Various entertainment trends that hurt certain types of musicians more than others (eg: In pop, today there is much less of a focus on band-oriented music, replaced with DJ/electronic type music)

None of this had much to do with IP. In fact, streaming / Napster / etc. may actually help some local musicians a touch (particularly in more niche genres), by allowing musicians to gain exposure in a way that is outside the standard corporate music environment (replacing the old tape trading circles of before).

Of course, exposure alone doesn't pay the bills. And there's certainly a case that streaming / Napster / etc. hurt the income of established musicians that relied heavily on album sales for their paychecks. But to me, it's strange when local musicians focus on only that (and yes I have heard the same from some). That route of income didn't really apply even in pre-Internet times, until you got "signed". (And if you weren't biz savvy, you could easily get screwed by that route too, see Albini's famous rant -- http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music )