A lot of what TIP says is attractive, at first reading. But when you go into it in more detail, it's less straightforward.

Comparison with Wikipedia is misleading. There, people are creating new writing, and choosing to make it freely available. That's great. However it's a bit different from making other people's creations available without their consent.

It's easy to talk about "just making archives available". The reality is that these are held by many different institutions and on a variety of recording media, some of them obsolete and many of them fragile. Many of them will require specialist equipment, and expert handling and processing, to convert them to digital media. Hardly a job for bloggers. Web hosting is the least of the problems, and the cost.

I agree that more could be done to widen access to archives which have already been digitised. However, it seems hypocritical to complain on the one hand how badly source singers were exploited by some collectors, and yet on the other to want free access to recordings of those singers.

As for CDs - many of these have limited appeal to a small niche market. With respect to Ralphie, the number of people interested in his recordings of McCann Duet Concertina playing, even by someone with his reputation, is likely to be limited. If the potential total market for a CD is 1000 buyers, then 1000 downloads is going to eat into that significantly, even if a good number of them would never have bought the physical album.

The downloading culture is creating a two-tier market for music - those who understand it and have access to it (mostly the younger generation) and those (mostly older) who don't understand it and don't know how to access it, and who both rely on buying CDs and actually prefer that medium. The problem for folk music is that most of its market currently is in the second group. So far I don't see a vast upsurge of interest from the younger group.

It seems to me we're going to end up with far more music of far lower quality. More recordings are being made without professional equipment and without professional expertise, and without the editorial filtering by a record company that weeds out the total dross. It's then published as low-quality MP3s. Ironically, there's now so much music out there that finding the good stuff is harder than ever.

Finally, I think TIP has a romantic view of the "olde days". Plenty of traditional musicians were professionals - perhaps not full-time, but they knew their worth and generated significant income from music, whether in cash or kind. Musicians like the Bulwers, Scan Tester and Billy Bennington were busy most weekends playing around their local areas, usually for cash or at least for beer.