Well I did say it is starting.

The Media from the Printing Press to Cable Television provided culture with the 'one size fits all' oneway consume-it strategy. It was not so much that we would be oldhat not to join in the madness as to be uninformed, and that in a most cases meant losing money.

One result of Massbroadcasting was OC the 'common consciousness', the public 'morality' etc. So from Marx to M&M there is a canvas on which to paint, a fertile ground to seed with yer stuff - whatever that may be. But nobody cared to ask what made any of it possible.

Reading social history from Luther to MTV it is hard to miss the emergence of all kinds of quakery under this new - at the time - Public Morality. From Hobbes to Freud they all cash in on its effects.

However that is about to forever change into something far far more amazing, something that will leave what we today call normal into a dusty forgotten irrelevant and strange way of life. To the Social Historian it will become the last days of Mass Media .

So if you think your Folkstuff is that good, post a sample on the internet - very easy these days - and see how many hits you get. The CD can be a MM file off a paysite.

If you think you can do old worn out songs about stuff everybody knows already go ahead, but what are you selling? Your voice? your skill as a picker?

OTOH posting a badly sung or played originals or local pieces might be time better spent, BECAUSE the Internet is a twoway nosizefitsall media, a meeting place for what is unique, a trading place for what is both unique and valuable, the beginning of Locality re-emerging as the dominant focus of attention. It is so alien to todays cultural heritage that we have to search back as far as the Darkages to find anything like it.

Folk (Corpofolk) is dead simply becuase it is no longer possible to force an audience to listen to it.