The best thing that ever happened to folk music was for the "music industry" to drop it and move away to plague someone else. No, folk isn't dead. It may not be possible to make a fortune from it these days, but that's not what it's for anyway.

Folk was never nearer to being dead than when it was all over the radio and being commercialised to hell, but it wasn't really dead, just stunned into a coma by big bucks. As an art, as opposed to an industry, it's healthier now that people have got back to doing it for the love of it, not because it's trendy or a route to being famous and wealthy.