Folk music is music that people use while doing something else at the same time: traditionially, worshipping, dancing, eating, or making the music at the same time as listening to it. Hence the same song is a folk song in church and an art song in the concert hall. It is an art song if I sit in my living room and do nothing but bathe in the music of my CD. If I'm vacuuming the living room at the same time, it's folk music. Muzak is folk music if used as background music in restaurants.

Sometimes when people speak of the decline of folk music, they are speaking not so much as a loss of repertoire, but of the loss of captive audiences. Many of the old songs were learned of old simply because singing was on of few available forms of recreation. Now the cultivation of the old songs is an individual accomplishment, bought by means of an investment of money and effort. This change is a result of greater individual freedom. I don't think I would give up my freedom even for the coziness of a homogeneous traditional small-town culture.