Speaking purely from observation, there are people who simply don't like music. Apart from humming the odd music hall tune my mother never put music on the radio or gramophone purely for pleasure in her adult life, neither would she seek out places where music was played. My father likewise, though he had a few army songs he'd come up with on a long walk. Now you could say they were both conduits for the folk process in action, or you could say they just didn't respond to music that went much further than a nursery rhyme to fill an empty moment.

Experience suggests some people who claim to like folk music exclusively operate with a similar emotion detachment to what most of us might understand by music. The tradition in its more austere forms requires little intuitive response to musicality but is more demanding on recall, repetition and what one might call poetics. I defer to no-one in an enjoyment of austerity in folk, classical or any other genre but the 'pleasures of the text' are undoubtedly different from those of tuneful forms.
Clearly there are exceptions but if I were to make a box that fit a larger percentage of arch traditionalists than excluded them it would be one that contained structured works which did not rely on empathetic musical emotion for their thrall.