ABSTRACT
it can be argued that, at the peak of their influence, folk music festivals emerged as necessary institutional links between radio and the NCFM market, and that for a period of time, festivals helped mitigate the growing adversarial relationship between the two. “It started with the 1970s,” was the reply I frequently received from people familiar with the inner workings of folk estrada. “It” clearly meant the market expansion of NCFM, not its musical beginnings. Yet, as I suggest below, along with its increasingly complex institutional organization, the lines of musical continuities were inscribed in newly composed songs more than was intimated by commentators noting the commercial decline of narodna music.
