Thanks GUEST Joe G - you have put it better than I could in the first part of your opening sentence:

I suspect that the reason people have left folk clubs is that there are far more ways of spending an evening LISTENING to good quality live music nowadays

THAT is what has been achieved by the experimentation you seem to favour. It has turned an audience who used to PARTICIPATE into an audience that by now can only LISTEN.

Well said Jim Carroll - When it became possible to leave a folk club without hearing a folk song, thousands walked away from the scene, club numbers were decimated, labels, magazines and shops dedicated to selling folk albums, instruments and books disappeared - That is exactly what I have seen unfold as well.