Sam, this is just an opinion, and I don't know if I'm even close to right.

The appeal in traditional music first comes from people wanting to do it, not just listen. That's always been the way the music's survived. People learn to love it because it's their music, then learn to love other people who do it well.

If you change the music to be more like pop, then you've got pop music. Please note, this isn't a value judgement - I quite like some of it. It's just that you won't have created an interest in traditional music by doing that.

I've seen other discussions on this, and there seems to be an opinion that young people don't get involved in folk because their image of a folkie is one of a mature, somewhat rotund bearded guy with his finger jammed in his ear. Kids place an awful lot of importance on image, and the current image (right or wrong) says "this is not your music." Maybe if the image changed, kids would be more interested. Of course, I have no idea how you would do that, other than with advertising and being seen with "cool" people and in "cool" places.

If you don't want to change the music, you have to change people's attitudes toward it.