They are out there, somewhere, and will come around when they are hungry.
Mike of Northumbria's comment about attendance and abstention is a good one. People have a dreadful tendency to go where the crowd is, in the - often - mistaken belief that there must be something there worth looking at. In fact the presence of many bodies will, to some extent, make them believe they are enjoying what's happening, whereas it's really the feeling of belonging, or being 'in' on something which creates the illusion. Or something... I think this is particularly true of the English; too fashion-conscious, which comes of all those centuries of kow-towing to marauding foreigners in order to stay alive.
Also, habit has something to do with it; once you get out of a habit, it can be hard to get back in - unless, of course it's something destructive! One thing that strikes me as possibly not helping, is that where folk clubs were once almost all weekly, many are now twice a month, or even once a month. I'm in the middle of trying to arrange a week or ten days of promotional floor spots around the East Midlands. Every time I arrange one of these trips, it takes me about a week, and I'm still left with nights when I'm doing nothing, because whatever week it is, half the clubs are not operating. It's very discouraging - and I need to do this, to get work; what's it like for the punters? There are other things they can do without all this palaver, so why would they bother? And if a club isn't run on a weekly basis, there is less likelihood of them developing the habit of regular attendance; each week becomes a seperate event, which then needs publicising as such. Once upon a time (when dragons prowled the earth, and you could make a living at being a folksinger), once a club was established, it became known that the club was on every Tuesday or Friday or whatever, and people could just turn up.
Getting me coat and umbrella before the deluge...
John Kelly.