The Hunt for Celtic Artists
22/8/2008, Liz Patton
What do you do if you’re trying to find a new Celtic artist and don’t want to spend a fortune on CDs to find what you like?
Let me introduce you to your new best friend – Pandora.com. I continually
find it a wonderful way to find new artists or old favorites that I keep forgetting to get CDs from.
Pandora is a free dynamic database based on the Music Genome Project. According to their Web site a group of musicians and
programmers got together about nine years ago to find a better way to analyze music based on similarity of melody, harmony,
instrumentation, arrangement and much more.
There are two ways to use this site that I’ve found helpful. For those with high bandwidth Internet connections in the US
you can use the free radio function. Hopping over to Pandora.com pops up
a Flash based ‘radio tuner.’ You can type in the name of a relatively popular artist and the player will generate a radio
station that is a mix of the artist you specified (if it is in their database) and artists that have similar musical earmarks.
You can also teach it about what songs you like using little thumbs up and thumbs down icons. Just while I was listening to it
and writing this article I found some very interesting artists, like Acoustic Eidolon.
I’d never heard of them before but they seem to be a Celtic version of what Bela Fleck has done for Bluegrass music.
It’s not perfect, sometimes it doesn’t latch onto the facets that you really like and sometimes it will surprise you.
I have a ‘Celtic’ station set up with artists like Capercaillie,
Clannad, Enter the Haggis,
Lunasa and Sinead O’Connor,
and what comes on? Cindy Lauper’s Time after Time…, which I expected on my ‘Phil Collins’ station. I’ve found that the
fewer artists you have on a station the better it is going to pick up on your tastes, though sometimes it does make a
certain station a little monotonous – but you can always set up more stations.
The second way to use Pandora, for those with low bandwidth or who live outside the US, is to go to
Pandora.com/backstage, which kicks you to their search engine.
For every artist that has a profile on there they try to have a biography, discography and a list of similar artists.
This is great for those looking for something more specific than the massive artist database we are trying to set up.
So if you like Solas, a relatively traditional Celtic group, you can
find other energetic bands that are very similar. In this case Pandora recommends The Biscuit Burners,
Hem, Peggy Seeger,
Allison Moorer and Kimmie Rhodes.
This helps if you don’t like other sectors of the Celtic music scene like Flogging Molly
– an east coast punk rock group with Celtic influences.
Pandora offers free memberships, but for those that want to support the site or want more options they can buy subscriptions.
The free site is supported by ads, because they pay copyright and licensing fees to the artists through performance rights organizations
like SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. The radio is not offered outside of the US because it is the only nation to have the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act or something like it. A lot of questions are answered on Pandora’s help pages.
Now that you have a place to find and sample all these interesting new artists all you have to do is not break your budget buying CDs.
If you’re bored or looking for a place to start you can check out my profile and stations on Pandora at www.pandora.com/people/liz297
About the Author
Liz Patton is the founder of Celtic Music Nations, an avid Celtic musician and fan. She has played guitar and bass for over a decade, and occasionally dabbles in other
Celtic instruments like mandolin, bodhran, fiddle and tin whistle. She wrote and edited for the University of Texas at Arlington's student paper for two years.
She has an Associate's in Commercial Music from South Plains College, and a Bachelor's of Music from UT Arlington.
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