Well I won't argue with other people's anecdotal experience of gig-going; I'll just comment that it doesn't match my anecdotal experience of gig-going by any stretch. (I will however point out that it's not just the activity of "going to see random bands", it's specifically going to see "a particular genre", week-in-week-out.)

I've found the disparity between the folk scene and the rock scene - in terms of infrastructure, ease of gettng gigs, audience attentiveness, amount of CDs sold afterwards - to be immense.

After Peggy Seeger's recent London gig, the merchandise stall was swamped. She sold full-price CDs and books by the truckload. One thing really stuck in my mind as being very revealing as the difference between folk audiences and rock audieneces: somebody picked up one small plastic slipcase CDR that was priced at £4 and said, incredulously, "is this really only £4?" That did make me smile - "only in folk", I thought. Recent indie gig I'd attended, by The Lovely Eggs, the merchandise table was utterly untroubled. (Despite the gig being packed and enthusiastic. At one of Brixton's great Offline nights)

If you regularly play open-mic/singer-songwriter type gigs in London, you'll know that there are literally thousands of young, good-looking, competent, pleasant-voiced singer-songwriters out there. They are competing with hundreds of thousands of their kind up and down the country. By contrast, the young, good-looking, competent, pleasant-voiced singers on the trad folk scene are competing with far, far fewer people.

This probably sums it up: a folk singer could be supporting a Top-10 album act such as the Unthanks or Bellowhead before they've even had an EP out. On a smaller scale, on the folk scene you can showcase your talents to a packed house simply by turning up to do a floorspot when a legend is playing.

This isn't a complaint - for me this is all part of the folk scene's charm. But it is a small world. I sometimes wonder, at singer-songwriter gigs, what would happen if the cat got out of the bag. Folk clubs would be deluged by all the competent, ambitious, professional singer-songwriters with pleasant voices clutching Folk Songs For Dummies.