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172 9 World Music Today Timothy D. Taylor A good deal has happened in the realm of “world music” since my book Global Pop: World Music, World Markets appeared in 1997. Although I have written much about world music since then, I have had few opportunities to step back and consider the long view of world music in the marketplace. My aim in this chapter is to lay out the nature of certain changes that have taken place in the last decade or so and to fill in some lacunae in Global Pop that have emerged since its publication . This chapter is less about “world music” itself than how its representations and constructions have changed in the years since 1997. The music itself, in fact, has not changed very much. To be sure, it often demonstrates an increasing familiarity with Anglo-American popular music and makes use of more sophisticated technologies and production techniques. In a more abstract and broader sense, however, it is still a category of music that includes many clever and complex amalgamations of Anglo-American popular musics with local musics worldwide. Since Global Pop, world music has become somewhat better known, increasingly part of the average American’s musical landscape. It is heard in the soundtracks of television programs, films, and advertising, and as background music in shops. But world music sales are still quite small, so meager, in fact, that the Recording Industry Association of America, which maintains records of sales in various categories, does not even include a world music category, instead relegating it to a category labeled “Other,” which, the Association notes, includes ethnic and folk music, among other genres. Indeed, the designation of “Other” accounted for 97.1 percent of sales in 2008, the last year for which data are available as of this writing (Recording Industry Association of America 2008). Still, world music is better represented in both recordings and print media than ever before. New sources have emerged such as the World Music Central website, World Music Today | 173 containing musicians’ profiles, interviews, book, CD, and concert reviews, obituaries , and other resources; the Critical World website, offering more scholarly information ; dozens of Internet radio sites devoted to world music, including Pandora , which can be tailored to a listener’s taste; and a surprising number of world music videos on YouTube. Print sources include World Music (Bohlman 2002); Contemporary World Musicians (Thompson 1999), an encyclopedic compendium of 404 biographies; Rhythm Planet (Schnabel 1998); and Songcatchers (Hart 2003), which lionizes artists who made field recordings of music from around the world. A glossy magazine, The Songlines, began publication in 1999. World music has even entered the school curriculum, with a spate of textbooks and a number of recent books targeting teachers.1 Yet, in most respects, the impact of world music has been minor. Significantly, however, a market for sample libraries has been growing, composed primarily of digitized bits of prerecorded music for use by composers and artists. Sample libraries contain snippets of various kinds of music that can be pasted into compositions being created on a computer, a common practice in most popular music today that is as simple as cutting and pasting text in a word-processing program. World music occupies a noticeable niche in the market for sample libraries, and through these sample libraries world music has insinuated itself into more mainstream kinds of pop and rock music, including, as noted, music used as soundtracks for film, television, and advertising, where world music has been replacing classical music in commercials for expensive goods, as I have written elsewhere (Taylor 2007, chap. 7).2 The ways that these sample libraries are marketed speaks to old attitudes about non-Western musics, as they are represented as exotic, strange, and evocative. A company called Killer Tracks was one of the first companies to enter the market a few years ago with the BMG Explorer Series, which the company described as follows: The Explorer Series draws on authentic ethnic music from around the world. Our comprehensive selection is highly evocative, conjuring up the atmosphere of exoticplaces,peoplesandcultures.Imaginetribaldancesand whirling fiestas, picture raucous traders in the medina, smell the aromas of an Indian spice market, they’re all here in this global offering. This is music that appeals to all of the senses.3 Killer Tracks included a sample of strung-together snippets that travels all over the world, although some of the music was clearly composed, not world music at all, and other...

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