Ralph Peer would not have wanted to avoid paying royalties--he, after all, held the publishing rights to the music that he recorded. And, owing to the folk process, we well know that, say, BF Shelton's version of "Pretty Polly" had significantly different lyrics than Clarence Ashley, so even "traditional" material was, in a sense, new.

Part of the appeal that the Bristol Sessions artists had for Peer was simply that they all came with their own material and arrangements. No need to find songs, no need to score an arrangement for the studio orchestra, no need for the artist to rehearse--you just stuck the performer in front of the mike, and recorded what came out. Of course, sooner or later, you ran out of old songs and needed new ones that sounded like the old ones. AP Carter was a master at rewriting old songs and patching together new lyrics for familiar melodies--

In this way, he really start us off to what we have now--then, as now, the music business was a business, and as such, needed an constant supply of new and (at least slightly) different material to sell--