Speaking of folk music in Finno-Ugric languages, I'd like to present you Marina Sadova from Mari El. Her native Mari language is definitely more "exotic" than Finnish or Hungarian, but I live not so far from Mari El and have more personal connection to that place than to the other regions populated by Finno-Ugric people. You may learn more about that place with help of
this wikipedia page (which is
quite biased, though).
From my impression, Mari language sounds equally distant from both Finnish and Hungarian (for my ears, it's more resembling Hungarian than Finnish, but in linguistics, Mari is grouped together with the latter). I discovered Marina Sadova because of this video, which was spammed by someone on 2ch.hk's /wm/ board like there's no tomorrow, and has spread from there to many English-speaking imageboards as well:
However, I like this one better, even if it sounds rather "pop" than "folk":
This is the case with most of her songs, but it's definitely not the worst kind of pop music (at least she actually can sing, unlike a lot of other pop singers):
Here's her performance at the Mari El Radio concert in 2013, with two her friends as stage dancers. While it also doesn't have much to do with the folk stuff like in the first video, you still can enjoy beautiful and talented Mari girls doing their best on stage :) As far as my tastes go, it's especially nice to see Marina wearing a short dress and high heels (and her two long-legged friends look very good too):
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If I'm not mistaken, the video below was filmed in
Yurino. I've been to there around 15 years ago, when I was ~12 years old, and it's the only place in Mari El I've visited so far (although I plan to visit Yoshkar-Ola or Kozmodemyansk this summer):
The biggest Marina's success so far is her performance on Liet International Festival 2014 - a festival for the bands and artists singing in minority languages which took place in Oldenburg (Germany). Here's
her profile on the official site of the festival (albeit it isn't very informative).
I couldn't find much more information about her, except for her date of birth (3 May 1997). Here are all her songs I could find, including the Russian versions of two of her songs, and one song she performed as a part of the "Yandar" duo:
Looks like Mari El has a thriving pop-folk scene (other Finno-Ugric regions near me, like Mordovia or Udmurtia, doesn't seem to have anything like this), with mostly female singers, but I haven't explored it thoroughly yet. Here's another good song of this kind, although the singer's voice isn't quite as strong as Marina's:
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