One Tent For The Whole World: Why Music Festivals Still Can't Tell Global Music Apart
by Aiden Kim
Walk through any big music festival and count how many stages are dedicated to just one genre of Western music. There's usually a whole stage for EDM — and even that gets split further into house, techno, dubstep, e.t.c. Then there's the indie stage. A hip-hop stage. The folk nook.
Meanwhile, somewhere on the map, there's a single tent labeled something like "World Music" or "Global Sounds," and inside it you might find a Peruvian panpipe group at 2PM, a Senegalese kora player at 3 PM, and a Greek bouzouki at 4 PM. All under the exact same banner.
That's the problem. Festivals love to advertise how "diverse" and "global" their lineups are. And to be fair, a lot of them really do book non-Western artists now. But booking someone isn't the same as actually representing them. Too often, the music itself gets flattened the second it gets sorted into that one catch-all "world" bucket — like the entire rest of the planet's music only needs one label, while American and European genres get a dozen.
Turns out, this exact problem got called out at the highest level of the music industry. In 2020, the Recording Academy — the people behind the Grammys — actually renamed their "World Music" award to "Best Global Music Album." They didn't do this quietly, either. They said it directly: the change was meant to be "a departure from the connotations of colonialism."
Let that sit for a second. A major, mainstream institution looked at the term "world music" and basically admitted: yeah, this was kind of a colonial way of sorting music.
Musician David Byrne (you probably know him from Talking Heads) has been saying this for years. He said the term "world music" works as "a way of dismissing artists or their music as irrelevant to one's own life." Basically, slapping "world music" on something quietly tells listeners: this isn't really for you, it's just... foreign stuff.
And ethnomusicologists (people who literally study music and culture together for a living) point out something else that's kind of obvious once you notice it: the label "world music" is defined by what it isn't. It just means "not Western." That's it. That's the whole definition. Meanwhile a genre like hip-hop gets sub-genres for sub-genres — trap, drill, boom bap, cloud rap — while Georgian polyphonic choir singing, Andean huayno, Cuban son, and West African griot storytelling can all get shoved under one identical banner like they're basically the same thing.
They're not. Each one of those has its own centuries-long history, its own instruments, its own reason for existing. Georgian polyphony is taught by literally singing in a group before you even understand the individual parts — it's one of humanity's oldest surviving oral-transmission systems. Cuban son mixes Spanish poetic structure with African-rooted rhythm from enslaved communities. These aren't just "vibes," they're entire cultural universes. Cramming them into one tent because none of them happen to be American or European pop is exactly the kind of flattening the Grammys themselves admitted was a problem.
What doing it right actually looks like
It's not like there's no better model out there. WOMAD — World of Music, Arts and Dance — has been running since 1980 specifically to showcase global music traditions with actual care and specificity, instead of treating them as one interchangeable category. It's proof this isn't some impossible standard. Someone's already been doing it for over 40 years.
So what now?
I'm not saying every festival needs to build out ten new micro-stages overnight. But the fix here isn't actually that complicated: name things specifically. Instead of "World Music Stage," how about a program that actually says what you're hearing — Andean folk, Balkan brass, Malian griot music, whatever it actually is? Give it the same respect you'd give a stage that says "Techno" instead of just "Electronic Stuff."
And honestly, as listeners, we can do our part too. Next time you see "world music" on a lineup, don't just shrug past it — look up what's actually playing. You might find out you've been standing three feet away from something with a thousand-year-old backstory the entire time.
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