As the film 'High Fidelity' demonstrated so charmingly!

As I've said previously in this thread, the 'world music' thing is pretty Britcentric. As is WOMAD.

Here is the US, if I walk in to Best Buy or other megastores, the world music bin is just plain bizarre, and contains a lot of New Age sorts of music, with a few ancient and random "international" CDs. Same is largely true at places like Borders and Barnes and Noble, which is where a lot of people go to buy music CDs nowadays. But sometimes Borders/B & N music sections are really good. I've always put that down to someone who works there actually knowing something about the music. And when you go into indie music stores, they usually don't carry the music at all, unless the store is a folk music store specifically. In which case you don't really need a label like 'world music' anyway.

Let's face it. Those who have had a decades long affair with music traditions from around the world used to buy their music by mail. Most of them probably still do, at least partly, because of the convenience and ease of access to such music due to the advent of globalisation and the internet. Their whining about not being able to get the music 'in the old days' (ie pre-globalisation era) had more to do with the paucity of recorded material available, and less to do with the music industry distribution system. Then, there was a phase where the problem became the distribution system. Now there isn't much of a problem with either. The world does keep changing, doesn't it?

What I've never been able to understand is why this handful of Brit music industry types and their lemming followers, keep insisting the whole world must fall into lock step with them, and use their label to describe music made by the rest of us. And if we say 'no thanks, that label doesn't work for us' then we are derisively dismissed by them and mocked as know nothings.