Bugger that HTML. Here is is again, 2nd edition to include facetious response to Shimrod's latest missive...

I think so, compared with a period when music could only be 'consumed' by being played or sung. Again, the distinction is reasonably clear unless you try to obscure it.

Pretty much what Will's said below there, although I might add that in no way am I trying to obscure anything and that the distinction is only clear if you wish it to be - like a belief in God, or the folk process, or fairies, or UFOs, or Ghosts, or the Orthodox reading of the 1954 Definition, belief in such things requires a very willing, and very subjective, faith - only to the faithful are such things ever clear.

For example, in Pip's period when music could only be 'consumed' by being played or sung not everyone played or sang - most people, then as now, were quite content to listen, be it to the ballad singer, or the storyteller, or the gossip, or else to dance to the fiddler, some of them no doubt making mental notes with respect of learning the piece themselves, much as we do today with our own covers of Traditional Songs, or whatever else we might sing in our folk clubs, only without the conceit of The Tradition that many of us have.

Someone singing a song or playing a tune is one form of playing back a musical recording; they've gone to trouble of learning it, and each time they'll sing it will be to the best of their ability - and even if they've sang it in exactly the same way 100 times before it's always going to be new for someone. That's why I go to singarounds - to hear people singing the Historical Songs, which, on a good night, will 90%+ of the experience, chorus singing notwithstanding. Quite often one might even hear an echo of the voice they learned the song from, or at least the recording of the voice they learned the song from, or there favourite folk singer. No different from The Jeps really, though to the Folk Faithful, who want this process to belong to some imagined past, there will be a world of difference.

I hear the ghastly sound of a dozen ageing folk heads being agonisingly shoved up their own distended arseholes, for comfort no doubt in the face of so horrifying a heresy wherein the Folk Process is demonstrably alive and well but happening to musical forms & genres they can't conceive of as being any way folk*.   

In listening to live music I am no more active or passive than I would be listening to a record - like just now, cleaning the cooker whilst listening to Gong's soundtrack for Continental Circus (1971), a record I've known since I was 13 but each time I play it, it thrills me afresh. The tradition of Northern Soul is founded on a very active appreciation of recorded music; other dance traditions likewise - like the Carnival Morris dancing that is such a feature of traditional culture in the North West of England and of which I was largely ignorant until experiencing it first hand at the weekend - thus contextualising the tantalising headline in the local rag from a year or so back : Morris Dancers Trash Marine Hall Foyer.

* I wrote this before reading Shimrod's post below there; as nice a piece of prophesy as one might wish for in the circumstances. So thanks for that, Shimrod - right on cue!