I am answering this on the basis of knowing very little about reggae music:
The problem is education. When I mention to people reggae, they all think of Jamaicans (which is fair enough) but they only think of Bob Marley. Everyone's heard of UB40, but when reggae is mentioned Marley is the name on everyone's lips. It's not surprising, his album is the greatest selling reggae album of all time.
Because of this association with Marley, people believed he was reggae, therefore when he died, they assumed that reggae died with him. The way to give life to a genre is for people to be aware. Black Uhuru is fairly popular, and everybody knows Eddy Grant.
To answer the question, it depends entirely on the people. If people are interested in it, they will listen to it and new bands will take it up as their music. I would love to start a reggae band but my talents are fairly limited, I can only play violin and piano
Everybody likes reggae, it's not like marmite, it's like Santa, most people love it, and everybody tolerates it. With that in mind, it shouldn't be too hard if there was a huge crusade to get the world to fall in love with it.
Another problem is the association with Jamaicans. Many a time I've had people come up to me and say "UB40 is fake, it's white reggae, they stole Jamaica's music" Obviously the people who say this are narrow minded (insert rude word). But there is still the conception that only Jamaicans are entitled to produce reggae music, which is quite frankly racist. I don't have a problem with eminem rapping, at least not because he is white. People have to see reggae as a multicultural multi-lingual culture.