We’re a little family who live on a countryside crossroads, about an hour north of Dublin in Ireland. My name is Cormac, my wife is Niamh and we have two girls - Isabelle (born 2005) and Heather born (2008). On this site you can buy CDs of the music that the kids like best, filtered a little by me as I don’t want to subject other grown-ups to anything too annoying.

I’ve been into music my whole life. I started piano lessons at age six, and I’ve played double bass in an orchestra, clarinet in a concert band, and guitar on the street. I joined a rock band at the age of 15 and I’m still playing in the same band, despite an almost total lack of critical or commercial success (completely undeserved, I might add). So naturally, when me and Niamh started breeding I was interested in how our children would react to music. Looking around on the web, and casually asking other parents, I found it hard to get beyond the “oh they like quiet stuff” or “oh they like classical music” clichés.

So, of course, I made sure to subject Isabelle to as wide a range of music as I could from conception onwards, in order to make sure that I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life stuck listening to the easy-listening side of the classical repertoire. It’s hard to know what her tastes would have been like if I hadn’t been so enthusiastic, but it seems to me that kids have few of the prejudices that grown-ups have and so tend to be very receptive listeners. Her favourites over the last 5 years have included, alongside the kids music you’ll find on this site, Toots and the Maytals, Abba, Black Sabbath, the “Oliver!” soundtrack, J.S. Bach and Missy Elliot. Heather’s starting to express preferences at this stage too, usually for either nursery rhymes or stuff with a danceable beat (like Herbie Hancock or Gogol Bordello).

Anyway, if you’re looking for suitable music for your own or friends’ kids I hope the site will be useful to you. Please feel free to add comments to any of the posts on the CDs, or if you find anything that doesn’t work as you expect or have any comments or criticisms at all on the site (I work as an internet programmer by day, so I’ve set up about a zillion online shops before, but this is the first real one I’ve run myself) please email me and I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can. And oh yeah, if there’s anything you’re looking for that I don’t have in stock just mail me and I’ll get it in if I can at all.

Oh, one other thing - if you want to hear what I/we think about other kids music that’s not necessarily for sale here, check out my 30 second children’s music reviews blog.