If you enjoy listening to an alternative type of music like folk, I would be willing to bet that it has become harder and harder to find live music in your town or neighborhood. The threat is that if you fail to generate market numbers that are significant, you will be washed away by those that do.

Actually that's not true in my experience. Largely because of the Internet it's much easier to find what live music there is. And there is probably actually more of it going on, at an informal non-commercial level.

Maybe we're being washed out of the commercial market, but so long as we can play the music and find enough other people who want to do the same, we'll get by. And alongside this, there is in the British Isles anyway, a semi-commercial scene around the festivals and clubs which makes it possible for a good number of great musicians to survive.

All right, I'm sure it's hard for them, and it must be galling for wonderful artists scraping a living to look at people making fortunes producing and selling junk (not all of it by any means, but most of it) - but there's a terrible price to be paid for that kind of thing.

There's a thread going on about Country Music at the moment - if you look at what's happened to Country Music, it makes you glad that the commercial predators aren't too interested in folk music.