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Meet the new generation of folk musicians: resilient, creative, authentic, and trying their best.<\/span><\/p>\n Young folk musicians approach their craft in many different ways. Some are carving entire new paths in the industry while others are upholding traditions rooted in the music they were raised on. All of them are trying to navigate an ever-changing industry characterized by unprecedented access to international audiences through social media and shifting listener trends.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re starting at a point where the industry is constantly changing and rearranging after COVID, so I find it\u2019s a little hard to kind of get a grasp of what\u2019s going on a lot of times,\u201d said Kaiday, an Ottawa musician who blends her French upbringing with folk, pop and R&B influences to create bilingual songs that feel authentic to her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n She\u2019s in her fourth year of Carleton University\u2019s Bachelor of Music program where she\u2019s met a community of like-minded young adults.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Being in the music program, Kaiday and her friends regularly support each other\u2019s shows. Recently, she\u2019s noticed the trend of young people leaning away from shows by local artists and toward big stadium shows. For Kaiday, the main selling point for supporting local live music is the cost: a $10 to $20 cover charge to see a local show compared to $300 at Ticketmaster \u2014 and contrary to popular belief, smaller audiences don\u2019t mean less talent, she said.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cPeople that are selling out stadium shows, like they had 1,000 followers at some point, and it doesn\u2019t mean that their music was less good back then.\u201d she said. \u201cPeople have this false idea that just because you\u2019re at the start or you don\u2019t have this amount of followers, that your music is less good, but that is so not true.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Speaking of followers, platforms like Instagram and TikTok have become unavoidable for musicians trying to reach new audiences at the start of their careers.<\/span><\/p>\n A Canadian example would be Winnipeg singer-songwriter Leith Ross, who blew up on TikTok during lockdown with their tender acoustic song \u201cWe\u2019ll Never Have Sex.\u201d They have since toured across Canada and the U.S. and announced dates for a UK\/Europe tour in the new year.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Nineteen-year-old Aisha Walters is a music-lover who first discovered Leith on TikTok during the pandemic and continues to find new artists on the platform today.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI found some really gem artists on there that are just sharing their stuff, like most of the time they haven\u2019t even released things yet but it puts them on my radar,\u201d said Aisha.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While some artists say it is a useful tool, managing your social media presence can feel like a full time job with potentially little reward.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt can feel like you\u2019re promoting a show nonstop,\u201d said Jaron Camp, one half of the indie folk duo York Street Thought Process. \u201cYou\u2019re making three posts a week for three or four weeks, and it\u2019ll still be like you best of friends that don\u2019t even know you\u2019re having a show because the algorithm didn\u2019t show them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n This never-ending content-generating cycle is what Kaiday calls \u201cthe game.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just so draining and so unpredictable too [\u2026] it leads a lot of people to burnout because it\u2019s like, \u2018Oh I don\u2019t want to have to do this\u2019, but then you have to play the game,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n Rachael Frankruyter is the other half of the Thought Process duo from southwestern Ontario. The pair place an importance on storytelling in their music and like to borrow techniques like improv from other genres to incorporate in their art.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n They are currently trying to work around social media as the primary outreach tool through mailing lists and tried and true methods like radio.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThat still helps reach an audience in a more real way,\u201d said Jaron.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Offline, getting recognized by a wide audience is also not easy. That\u2019s part of the reason why 19-year-old Annie McCarthy started the YouthFolk Festival from scratch in her hometown of Guelph, ON in August.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cHaving watched a lot of local bands in the community, I\u2019ve noticed that they kind of just get the same people coming out, like family and friends,\u201d said Annie. \u201cSo I think it\u2019s really difficult for these bands and musicians to get a larger audience to come on down because it\u2019s hard to get that outreach.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The festival ran from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m and had a lineup of 10 performances by musicians between the ages of 15 to 25. All the volunteers, including tech crews, also fell into this age group. The festival was pay-what-you-can because Annie wanted to make sure it was accessible.<\/span><\/p>\n For Annie, it was important to give youth the opportunity to try their hand at the backstage side of things because she didn\u2019t see a lot of opportunities for young people to learn these roles. For young musicians, Annie wanted to give them the chance to learn more business-focused skills to implement their future careers.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re a musician, it\u2019s almost like you\u2019re your own entrepreneur. You have to know how to do a hundred and one different things in order to get yourself out there,\u201d she said. \u201cI think if we give people the blueprint it makes it easier for them to learn and advocate from there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Outside of curated events like this, Jaron and Rachael are noticing a shift in their audience\u2019s demographic.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOur whole life performing typically has been an older-than-us audience but I definitely feel in the last three to four years that we\u2019ve had more young people coming out to our show,\u201d said Jaron. He partly credits this to the rising popularity of the pop-folk genre by artists like Noah Kahan.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI think folk music is becoming more of a thing for young people than maybe it was 10 or 20 years ago,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n Country artist Naomi Bristow has stuck to her traditional country roots since she started performing at six years old and thinks it\u2019s good for young audiences to get the chance to hear older styles of music through her covers of Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton tunes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cEverything comes back around, comes back into trending times, right?\u201d said Naomi. \u201cThere is a market for people to be introduced to old-time stuff and think, \u2018that\u2019s pretty cool; my grandparents used to listen to this.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The most rewarding part of being a folk musician for these artists is the irreplaceable feeling of the connection of live music. For Jaron and Rachael, they hope this feeling resonates with young listeners.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen you go to these small independent shows, you can actually connect with the musicians and form a long-lasting bond, which is a really cool thing and it can help with isolation and help you feel part of something that\u2019s bigger than you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.rootsmusic.ca \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" YouthFolk Festival in Guelph Ontario, 2025. [Photo Credit: Maggie Brown] Meet the new generation of folk musicians: resilient, creative, authentic, and trying their best. Young folk musicians approach their craft in many different ways. Some are carving entire new paths in the industry while others are upholding traditions rooted in the music they were raised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2275687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2275686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Meet-the-newest-generation-of-folk-musicians-and-organizers.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2275686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2275688,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275686\/revisions\/2275688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2275687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2275686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2275686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2275686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The social media grind<\/h2>\n
Trying to work around social media<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rootsmusic.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/YSTP_promo1-scaled.jpg\")
A folk festival to support young artists<\/h2>\n
Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n