I'm re-entering a debate I told myself I wouldn't ever do again, but for what its worth my opinion is roughly as follows.

Labels are useful to point you at things you are likely to find interesting. For example if I go into a record shop with a Folk Music section, I expect I'll be more interested in what I find there than the stuff in the hip-hop section. Whether this is true or not depends on how knowledgable/diligent the shop staff are in filing their content. The same goes in choosing festivals. Once I go to the appropriate section I will make my choices based on what I find there and will not agonise over whether or not it meets someones definition of what is 'folk' or 'traditional'.

The term traditional has a specific meaning in copyright law which is useful in resolving legal disputes, but to me has no other meaning in classification of music.

In formal academic study people tend to define the meaning of the terms they use in the context of what they are writing. These will vary from time to time and from place to place. Given the 'revival' happened 30-40 years ago in the countries that needed a revival, the term revivalist is losing/has lost its meaning. The work of the early revivalists has passed through a couple of generations at this stage and probably merits classification as traditional as much as much of the music that was classified as trad by the early revivalists.

If a source singer who wrote/learned a song in the thirties was trad to someone in the 50s, surely a song from the 50s is trad to someone born in the nineties and singing/playing in the naughties.

To me the importance is whether the song is rooted in a style or tradition which can be described as folk or traditional. It may be of interest to academics to split hairs between calling something tradional or 'in' or 'of' the tradition, but I couldn't be bothered.

What matters to me is whether the tradition is in a healthy state and where I come from I am delighted to say this is the case. There are more young musicains in Ireland playing music in traditional styles (and many of them are more aware of this than people of earlier generations) than there were at the height of the so called revival.

To me the important thing is that the body of music (or song) is traditional rather than a particular tune or song. I love tradtional Irish music (and music from many other traditions considered folk or not). If the tune is a quality one in the tradition it doesn't matter to me whether it is a week old or hundreds of years - although I am delighted that some songs and tunes from those days have survived.

I'm off now to play some music, in a variety of styles, at my local session. And no one will care much what the source of the music is - as was very much the case when the original collectors went out collecting the songs/tunes.