World music (term)

To enhance the learning process (John Hill), he invited more than a dozen visiting performers from Africa and Asia and began a world music concert series.

An amalgamation of roots music in the global, contemporary listening palette has become apparent, which weakens the role major entertainment labels such as Columbia, Warner, MCA and EMI can play in the cultural perception of genre boundaries.

Similar terminology between distinctly different sub-categories under primary music genres, such as world, rock and pop, can be as ambiguous and confusing to industry moguls as it is to consumers.

[11] The concept behind the album had been to express his own sensibilities using the sounds he had fallen in love with while listening to artists from Southern Africa, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Savuka.

This project and the work of Peter Gabriel and Johnny Clegg among others had, to some degree, introduced non-Western music to a wider audience.

At the outset of the 1987 meeting, the musician Roger Armstrong advised the reason why something had to be done: [He] felt that the main problem in selling our kind of material lay with the UK retail outlets and, specifically, the fact that they did not know how to rack it coherently.

As part of the "world music" campaign, it was decided that these would be a two color affair designed to carry a special offer package; to aid the retailer a selection of labels would also be included, presumably for shelf or rack edging.

The next step was to develop a world music chart, gathering together selling information from around fifty shops, so that it would finally be possible to see which were big sellers in the genre—so new listeners could see what was particularly popular.

This is primarily due to the fact that dominant corporate structures for music distribution and promotion in Europe and North America originate in those continents, as do their forums for establishing industry genre categories.

In October 1999, Luaka Bop label founder and ex-Talking Heads frontman David Byrne wrote an "I Hate World Music" editorial in The New York Times explaining his objections to the term.

Byrne argued that the labelling and categorization of other cultures as "exotic" serves to attract an insincere consumption and deter other potential consumers.