It is at least in part due to these changes that most of the "peasants" no longer feel the need to enjoy the "folk experience" and turn to mass-produced entertainment. Folk music is now enjoyed in a very different environment and in a very different context.

The root problem here is that Folk as we (& Conrad) understand the term is the residue of a Bourgeois construct, abstracted & refined for a (mostly) graduate white transatlantic middle-class that retains that priviledge. Meanwhile, your actual peasant / working class folk life continues apace, as it always has done; it still has its songs & culture, just none of it is of any interest to the (mostly) GWTMC Folkies who dismiss it (as Howard has done) as mass produced without any appreciation how it operates in societal context. Folk (as we & Conrad understand the term) is of little interest to your actual peasant / working-class folk for reasons too numerous to go into here, but basically because it lacks contemporary relevance and therefore appeals only to a minority of (mostly) GWTMC Folkies (such as we & Conrad).

As Conrad has demonstratred, Folk is, in effect, a hobbyist religion in which one might appropriate residual so-called folklore - in Conrad's case everything from Traditional Tyneside Songs illustrated by crap scans of the woodcuts of Joseph Crawhall 2 (which even in his lifetime (1821-96) were an essentially post modern pastiche) to the Mari Lwyd. That it is no longer actual folklore is by the by - any more than a Traditional Song sung by a Revival Singer is an actual folk song. It is however Folk and as such can only be as authentic as (say) a model railway and bears as much relationship to immediate / actual folk life as a model railway does to our national rail network.

This is the nature of Folk; as it has been now for over a century and I don't expect it'll ever be any different. If we randomly selected 100 working-class people and put them on a desert island with no access to radios, CD players, iPods, mobile phone networks, computers & televisions, what they'd be singing 40 years down the line would be genuine folk processed folk music regardless of its ultimate provenance. One might imagine how the theme song for (say) Only Fools & Horses might provide the basis for quite fantasic developments all of which would be of significant interest to the genuine folklorist. However, if you isolated 100 (mostly) GWTMC Folkies in a similar fashion, then all you'd get is the same stuff they've always been singing, self-consciously done by way of preserving (or otherwise singing about) an enshrined, romanticised & entirely depolulated past; an empty heritage (the Abandoned Village Project anyone?) which might only appeal to the likes of us - and Conrad, of course, who still might ponder why the real folk stay away in droves.