I'm sorry, guys/chaps, I really don't get it.

Yes, I can sit around all day playing folk music to my golden retriever. (Who is 17 and deaf.) While I am doing this, I can tell myself all kinds of solipsistic things about preserving the tradition. But I'm only preserving it until the rapidly approaching limit of my three-score years and ten.

If I admit "observers" to the phenom--goshes! someone might like it. Whether or not that someone can return the favor is totally immaterial, IMO. (Background track: "Make just .... one someone happy ....") That would be a gain.

Or, an observer might say, "Cripes, you bleep, you sing flatter than a pancake. Why the Hell don't you take voice lessons before inflicting yourself on the public." That would be a gain too. I very well might either work on my act or stop frying people's brains.
That would be a gain.

So I don't get it. "Should Observers be wasting the time of Mudcat Folk?" I don't know how you meant that; to me, if taken seriously, it just comes off arrogantly. The only other explanation that occurs to me so far is that this is an exercise in re-phrasing THE PERENNIAL THREAD so it seems new, exciting, and something Obama followers who are on fire for change would vote for.

Are "Observers" (what's the diff between them and "audience" anyway?) out to corrupt the process? That's a risk we have to take. Me, I learned to say, "You want to hear Rap Crap? I'll defend your right to go home and play it to your heart's content, as loud as you want until the neighbors call the cops, but right now I'm doing my thing, and if you listen, you may learn to like it. Or not. Ideas compete in the marketplace, so let 'em compete."

We're down to two possibilities: this is an ersatz pseudo-question, or ..... I don't get it. :)

CC