I believe the folk process is basically over, because the oral tradition is basically dead - killed by the ubiquity of broadcast music and recorded music.

The problem is that the availability of broadcast music cuts away the ground from under the oral tradition. Do you sing while you work? Do your workmates? Do you sing at home to relax? When your friends or family want some music of an evening, do they suggest having a few songs? The oral tradition works in communities and societies where people can, by and large, answer Yes to all four. Those conditions may still obtain in some parts of the world, but they certainly don't in Britain (or the US).

This isn't something that's happened overnight. The uniformity imposed by mechanical reproduction has been eroding the oral tradition for a long time, going back to pianolas and mass-produced parlour songbooks. Ironically, the oral tradition finally gave up the ghost (in this country at least) at around the same time the Revival was really getting going.

Oral transmission among folkies does go on, but we aren't so much a community as a network of hobbyists.

Live music made by enthusiastic amateurs (and a few enthusiastic professionals) is great - it's one of the brighter spots in my life at the moment. Live traditional music, in particular. The songs that have survived from the oral tradition - or survived long enough to be collected - are, by and large, really good songs: in performance, they work in a way that most new songs don't. It's true that there are new songs coming through in the style of the old songs - Shantyman, Bring us a barrel and so on - but they're only ever likely to be heard by a tiny minority of the population.

Does pop music occupy the niche formerly occupied by folk music? No - nothing does. Live music made by ordinary people without making a big deal of it - because it's what you do, because it passes the time, because everyone's got a song in them - has basically died out. A bit of humility, and a bit of awareness of what's gone, are in order. We're not the folk, and any new music we make is never going to be folk music.