"So I have to accept that the term has changed."
Then you have to define what it has changed into so we can continue to discuss it.
I have hundreds of books labelled "folk" or "tradition" going back to the beginning of the twentieth century and beyond, dealing with a specific and identifiable type of song (and related cultures and activities).
I have dedicated half a century listening to singing, studying and researching that specific type of music - thirty years of that time was spent finding old singers, recording their songs and interviewing them on how those songs fitted into their lives.
That time has only confirmed in my mind the idea I first started out with - that there is a unique body of song and music, that it held a unique place in the lives of people and communities and that they claimed it as "ours" (Irish, Traveller, Norfolk... wherever) something they can never claim about music that was manufactured and copyrighted by a business to be sold.
It's not the repetition or the alteration or the like or dislike that makes it traditional - it's role within the communities it served and almost certainly where it originated.
If the terms used to identify that music no longer serves because they have been replaced by other types of music, then you have to say why that is - you have to re-define the term.
Bert Lloyd summed it up perfectly way back in 1967 when he wrote "If Little Boxes and The Red Flag are folk songs, then we need a new term to describe The Outlandish Knight, Searching for Lambs and The Coalowner and the Pitman's Wife".
I suggest that the length of time the terms have been in use, the amount of research that has gon into the subject and the century or so of published material making use of the terms 'folk' and 'traditional', it is far, far too late to rename our music now - the term is too well defined for that.
It's not as if these changes you claim to have taken place have happened because the public have taken them up and re-applied them They are not terms in general use in any shape or form when applied to music - we have failed miserably to involve the broad mass of people in our music.
These changes are being demanded by a tiny number of self-interested people who lack either energy or imagination to think of a name or definition of unrelated music that catches their fancy - and even they are not agreed on what that new definition is.
The term(s) are now a a convenient cultural catchall to suit people who don't necessarily like folk or traditional music but find the term handy for their own particular ambitions and interests.
That is not how language evolves - it is not evolution but self-serving manipulation.
One of the features of traditional/folk music is that it has bee ruled to be in the public domain - try tellin the copyright holders of Eleanor Rigby that it belongs to us all and wait for the waterfall of legal writs to come showering through your letterbox.
What do you suggest - that folk song be taken out of the public domain and be subject to copyright, as are Beatles songs?
I'd have thought that folk music proper has enough problems to cope with if it is to survive.
Jim Carroll