Finding interesting local music when you search YouTube for a country is a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition. However, I think your chances are best when you search for a country in which the main language is a smaller language. Searching for most Spanish speaking countries turns up the same mega stars of Spanish language pop music. I like a lot of this music, but it isn’t really musical tourism (there are exceptions and if I keep this series going long enough I’m sure I’ll share some).
Searching for “Latvian music” on the other hand, turned up a treasure trove of interesting music.
The first video we got from our search was from the pop music duo Musiqq. It is a cool video… we were hooked:
From there, we ended up watching Miks Dukurs in a video about a car:
Then it was back to Musiqq for a video that definitely makes me want to visit Latvia for some hiking in the atmospheric mist:
And before long, we landed in some Lativian folk music, which is pretty cool! Check out this one, which the YouTube comments tell us is a song sung at summer solstice to honor the oak tree:
There is more cool Latvian music just waiting for you to go and search for it! This was one of my favorite musical tourism stops so rather than trying to post all of the songs we enjoyed here, I’ll just encourage you to go look for yourself.