World

Studies of world music tend to focus on its peak in the 1980-1990s and related genres such as “world beat” and New Wave. By the 1980s, record executives had come to realize that there was a significant market for non-western music and that consumers of world music overlapped quite a bit with consumers of rock music. With an overwhelming array of new musicians bursting onto the scene, collaborations between western artists and musicians from the global South, and high-profile groups appropriating non-western musical styles, the market quickly became saturated. But by analyzing the emergence of world music as a genre in the 1950s and 1960s when the LP was ascendant, we can better understand how and why the genre and the format became so pervasive and culturally significant later in the twentieth century. The global phenomenon of “world music” hinged on developments in earlier decades, when the LP made non-western music a commodity that European and North American listeners would come to crave.