Dick, you have noticed that Soldier boy did not refer to the Musical Traditions magazine now, right? :-) So pls leave any moans about it alone, they don't answer Sb's question.

Malcolm's answer is the bets, I subscribe to that. Jon, agreed that not "much" of today's writing efforts will pass into the tradition of the future. But some undoubtedly will - if only we could pinpoint it, we'd get rich! But then, the percentage of the past's efforts that remained as tradition is probably similar anyway; we have no way of knowing really.

Richie, while the "no verifiable author" is part of the current definition of traditional, I think it's starting to creak as recording technology catches up and with it memories get longer - nowadays we do know the authors of several older-than-100-year-old songs, for example, while in the past a song could be termed "traditional" within a couple of generations (except it wasn't of course, it was just "old"; "traditional" I think came into use more recently, and probably after the term "folk" was coined, to differentiate from newer burblings). But I agree that "Just because something is not new doesn't mean it's not of value" - and also the reverse.