It depends what we mean by "world music", I suppose. It appears that Paul Morrison means, essentially, rock music incorporating "ethnic flavours", so his use of the term "folk music" only serves to confuse the issue. Perhaps he supposes his readers cannot tell the difference, or was deliberately not comparing like with like (the old straw man syndrome I mentioned).

Of course you wouldn't put up, let's say, Boden and Speirs against the Beatles or the Kinks (I'd say that the Stones were less typically British), any more than you'd realistically compare Phil Tanner with Kathleen Ferrier. Not a question of quality, authenticity or anything like that, but of the essential fatuity of trying to decide, for example, whether oxygen is "better" than nitrogen.

I'd expected a longer piece. Turns out it's just one of those wee "opinion" columns that magazines drop in to stir things up a bit. I don't expect the boy means any harm, but he needs to clarify his thinking if he wants to do serious work in the future; assuming he actually meant what he said and wasn't just dropping stones into the pool. A pity, though, that such people so often lack the imagination or the pride in their craft to do anything other than pick on what they see as the soft target every time. In that, he is following a very old and rather sad tradition.

Still and all, it's only pop journalism: cheap and ephemeral, produced off the top of the head to demand. You can't expect serious analysis from hacks who can't or won't take the time to do the research; trouble is, the unwary may believe that they reading something written by some kind of expert.