Definition of world music in English English dictionary
The term world music includes traditional music (sometimes called folk music or roots music) of any culture that are created and played by indigenous musicians or that are "closely informed or guided by indigenous music of the regions of their origin," including Western music (e. g. Celtic music). Most typically, the term world music has now replaced folk music as a shorthand description for the very broad range of recordings of traditional indigenous music and song from around the world
Music from cultures other than those of Western Europe and English-speaking North America, especially popular music from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. a type of popular music which has influences from traditional music from different countries. Musical genre incorporating diverse styles from Africa, eastern Europe, Asia, South and Central America, the Caribbean, and nonmainstream Western folk sources. The term was first coined largely in response to the sudden increase of recordings in non-English languages that were released in Great Britain and the United States in the 1980s, but by the early 1990s world music had become a bona fide musical genre and counterpoint to the increasingly synthetic sounds of Western pop music. Initially, African popular music and world music were virtually synonymous, and the genre's biggest stars included the Nigerians King Sunny Ade and Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the Senegalese Youssou N'Dour. Moreover, one of its earliest advocates was the Cameroonian-born Frenchman Francis Bebey. By the 21st century world music encompassed everything from Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the pop-flamenco of the French group the Gipsy Kings to "ambient-global" projects that merged so-called ethnic voice samples with state-of-the-art rhythm programming