Whence the difference?
Still Sting's song and always will be - doesn't make it a good or bad song.
It's not the subject matter which makes a song 'folk'
I neer once, in the years I knew him, heard MacColl refer to one of his songs as 'folk', though he was takig his subjects from working lives and quite often, basing his language on recorded actuality taken from people like Jack Elliot, or Sam Larner or The Stewarts.
He went out of his way to point out that his songs weren't folk songs and at no time was he part of a club that called itself a 'folk club'.
The argument was that it was possible to get pleasure from singing and listening to the songs and it was also possible to use the forms of folk songs to make new songs - whether they became 'folk' really wasn't our decision to make - that was down to posterity.
Jim Carroll