World / International

World, or "International" as AllMusic labels it, is more of a catchall category than a single style. In the Western record industry, the term refers to music that does not fit North American or British pop and folk traditions, or to hybrids built from various indigenous musical traditions around the globe (AllMusic, n.d.-i). Think of it as a catch-all bin at a store. Some styles, like reggae or Latin pop, grew popular enough to get their own dedicated shelf, but everything else, from traditional Chinese music to African folk, gets grouped together under one broad label (AllMusic, n.d.-i).

The term itself has a specific origin. Ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown is credited with coining "world music" in the early 1960s at Wesleyan University, where he built a program that brought in performers from Africa and Asia and started a concert series around them (World music (term), n.d.). At that point, it was not really a genre at all, more a label for traditions Brown was studying and sharing.

The term only became a household phrase decades later. It took hold in the 1980s as a marketing category, used by record labels to sell non-Western traditional music to Western listeners (World music, n.d.). Picture a record store trying to sell something with no obvious matching aisle. "World music" became the aisle they invented for it. Within this label, the genre later grew to include subgenres such as ethnic fusion and worldbeat, which blend traditional sounds with Western pop and rock elements (World music, n.d.). AllMusic makes a similar distinction: worldbeat is not one specific sound, but rather a deliberate mixing of styles that could only happen from a globalized, multicultural point of view, often updating traditional sounds using modern production or borrowing from Western pop (AllMusic, n.d.-j).

That Western audience for the genre really grew in the mid-1980s, when rock artists like Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon began weaving ethnic sounds into their own recordings and pursued collaborations with world music artists directly (AllMusic, n.d.-j). Because the category is defined mostly by what it is not, rather than by a shared sound, it remains one of the broadest and most debated labels in music.

Sources:

AllMusic. (n.d.-i). International music genre overview. https://www.allmusic.com/genre/international-ma0000002660
AllMusic. (n.d.-j). Worldbeat music subgenre overview. https://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/worldbeat-ma0000011922
World music. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_music
World music (term). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_music_(term)