So I guess it is because professional musicians are greedy and WON'T make music part of their lifestyle preferring instead to live life as wandering juke boxes.

I say we can do without them in that case.

I play tin whistle, alto horn, bones if I have a hymnal I sing I have done all professionally, also a professional storyteller.

I just do this stuff. I tell stories to people in line when shopping, I pull out the tin whistle. I play each sunday alto horn and never once does it enter my head that I have spent time learning. I am always learning. Yes my parents gave me music lessons but never ever do I think of that however, apparently for some musicians that is their main concern in life the burden of all that learning time and money. I recently purchased two alto horns on ebay- inexpensive ones but good ones. I dont think of them as investments- how crude- they are instruments.

Ok they can opt out and hang around and benefit from the increassed demand which comes from free music or do it for free a few times a year. So you are basically saying we should tolerate a lack of dedication to the people and to the tradition replaced by self interest. Dont think so.

Nobody has to have money to play music or sing or tell stories. Believe me they happen without money.

When I taught history I ran into teachers with burn out. I could not live without being interested in history but they had more interest in golf and running than the field they were supposed to be dedicated to. At that point hang it up take a break and let someone who is not burned out carry it forward.

So now we have removed the self centered burned out pro musician who happens to have spent way way too much on equipment- they can stay home. Or not.

So whats holding back the expansion of free music then?

Note- session music in pups sells food and bier and around here the musicians do not play sessions in reasonable places they always seem to gather at expensive places where the landlords give them food and drink to play to help rip off their customers.

I was once criticized for teaching in an Irish Pub in Bmore city.
At the end of the session when off the clock I would get a pitcher of the cheapest beer domestic- thats all I could afford and shouldnt have paid for that. I was criticized as drinking pitchers of cheap beer. Yeah the critic was a musician playing for free pints of an Imort and getting cash as well. Which of course raised the cost of my bier.

I do not have in mind sessions I am talking festivals. One could have a series of nearby venues.

We don't do free music for exposure either and that is an ancient line. We do it to spread the music in the most efficient manner and to widen the community by so doing. Money screens out people who dont have it simple as that and when that is done it is wrong.

Live the music and it will grow faster.

Conrad