As a result of threads here I've been looking at both Seth Lakeman and Oliver Schroer on YouTube.

Technically, they have a lot in common, both have a predilection for thick drony sounds. Visually, their playing is also rather similar, though Schroer managed to do without the faked length of hair dangling off the tip of the bow for showbiz effect (all neatly snapped at full length, I assume he snips it at the frog with nail scissors). In dress sense Lakeman is a long way ahead (no orange satin shirts).

As an accompaniment texture, Lakeman's fiddle works fine. He doesn't really try to do self-contained solos. The style is traditional enough, but it's mostly used as decoration applied to pop songs, in the same way that the Beatles applied brass band or string quartet sounds to their music. Pop has been using decorative exotica for fifty years, there is nothing new in this.

In some ways Schroer's fiddling is less traditional. He wasn't just doing something decorative, he was composing a new kind of music which is at least as different from North American folk fiddle as Scott Skinner's stadium showpieces were from the dance music he grew up with. It doesn't always have an immediate impact as Lakeman's does, it grows on you. I'm not sure how much of it people would think of as folk, or if Schroer himself wanted it to be seen that way. Some of it might fit into the instrumental session scene (as the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "Music for a Found Harmonium" has done); other pieces are just too big (session players don't memorize large-scale works) but could fit in to the concert stage to add variety to a programme.

Whatever you categorize each of them as, Schroer's music gives me more to think about, enough so that I'm going to try to learn some of it (and I don't even play the fiddle).

Another difference is that Schroer made a real effort at building his music into the community, getting young people to play it, which is what established performers in the traditional music scene often do. I don't think Lakeman holds workshops on performing his songs, does he?