I have suggest this several times and in the light of George rephrasing the question in a new thread, I will rephrase my opinion.

As a general rule, we are governed by fashion which is mainly led by marketing and even if deciding what is good or bad is a subjective issue, qualtity has very little to do with it.

Companies invest billions into making us believe that thier product is better than the oppositions, what is the fashionable thing to be doing, etc. They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't know that we are a bunch of easily led fools would they?

To some degree, this has happened with folk music and Celtic became a very big label used by the marketing to promote it.

Perhaps one of the reasons that folk music doesn't sell as much is that a great number of the players are not interested in the big money and would rather stay true to their music. Rather than just churn out anything that the powers that be decide are going to be the most likely numbers to sell.

BTW I consider classical music to be superior to folk music in terms of melodic structure but I still prefer folk music. The reasons are quite simple: It is music that I can play (and I do believe that a lot of it is rather more melodic than some of the pop music that I have heard), I love the folk dance dance rythyms (jigs, reels, hornpipes etc) and the words to many songs can be quite thought provoking.

Perhaps another problem with folk music is that a person does have to listen to get anything from it. A lot of songs could not be played as background noise (which seems to be what music is often used for) and as it is the words that give the meaning. I would also suggest, perhaps a bit unfairly, that a vast number of the population actually prefer a set of inane words that they can sort of chant out to words that they might have to think about to understand.

In the case of the dance music, people often fail to listen to the melody and just pick up on the rythym and reach the conclusion that it all sounds the same (even though we use 2/4, 4,4, 6/8, 9/8, 12/8... which is rather more than the normal 4/4 rock beat) and this is not helped by the session players who will play 2 hours worth of just reels at break neck speed (and as I think somebody recently commented in umf, often with a total lack of epression or feeling) because nobody who is just a listener (ie never played it) is going to understand it or hear the subtle differences between tunes.

Jon