world music
world music noun: traditional music, as opposed to popular music or classical music.
Noun
world music (countable and uncountable, plural world musics)
- Traditional music, as opposed to popular music or classical music.
- Music that combines elements from traditional styles from the non-Western world along with modern, popular elements, in order to create something marketed towards Western audiences.
- While it can be considered a metagenre, world music is really more of a marketing category.2016, Roy Shuker, Understanding Popular Music Culture, page 123
world music meaning in Arabic
world music in Arabic
- traditional music, as opposed to popular music or classical music
- موسيقى العالم
- music that combines elements from traditional styles with popular elements
- موسيقى العالم
Forms of world music
| plural | world musics |
|---|
Origin of world music
Attributed to ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown (1960s), later primarily used as a marketing term.
Questions about world music
- What does world music mean?
- World music means traditional music, as opposed to popular music or classical music.
- What is world music in Arabic?
- World music in Arabic is موسيقى العالم. See World music meaning in Arabic.
- What part of speech is world music?
- World music is a noun.
- What is the plural of world music?
- The plural of world music is world musics.
Words near world music in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: world music (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “world music.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/world_music. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.