"Youth culture doesn't look backwards for its inspiration but believes it is living with the very latest that music can offer; and apart from a short period in the sixties, when music seemed to be driven by genuine musicians, young people buy into the crap sold to them buy businessmen."

Sweeping, pointless and wildly inaccurate generalisations, Alan. Just like the ones the media make about folk music.

"We have a lot to offer, including a good standard of behavior..."

Is this part of the problem or part of the solution?

"There will, of course, be a curmudgeonly bunch who will want to retain the cliquish "Our Little Club" attitude, but surely folk music is bigger and more welcoming than that."

Given that the "curmudgeonly bunch" are all over (the UK arm of) Mudcat like a cheap suit, this is the bit they will home in on, not the interesting points you make. Anyone who dares to criticise the status quo will be issued a folk fatwah and have their eyes put out for trying to destroy the folk scene as they want it to remain. Thankfully the music is more enduring than a superannuated 60s youth movement is likely to be...

I actually agree with some of the points you are making. To me folk has two arms, and they have nothing to do with traditional versus contemporary, for instance. On the one hand we have the hobbyists - those who favour the singaround and session and those who inhabit the strange and murky world of the folk club. The model railway enthusiasts as Sedayne would call them. On the other we have those who would "professionalise" folk music in order to have it compete in the marketplace as one genre amongst many, to sink or swim depending on a mixture of merit and quality of the PR and so forth. As Tom Bliss has pointed out, the two arms have a symbiotic if at times fraught relationship. And I believe both arms are as old as the hills - singing/playing for pleasure and singing/playing for recompense.

My problem with the professionalisation of folk music, and particularly traditional music, is that so much of it is so fecking bland. It's as is a whole swathe of talented musicians and singers have ambitions no greater than making music that would sound alright on Radio 2: safe, anodyne, easy listening pap. No rough edges or experimentation or vision or challenges: just twee, lowest-common-denomintor aural wallpaper.

Give me the Owl Service or Alasdair Roberts or Pumajaw any day.