the.com/world music

means A marketing and retail category used to lump together non-Western (or non-English-language) music of wildly different styles, traditions, and countries under one vague label.

from The term was deliberately coined in 1987 by a group of UK independent record label owners and promoters, meeting in a London pub, who needed a single bin category so record shops would actually stock and display African, Latin American, and Asian artists instead of scattering them randomly or not carrying them at all. It worked as a sales tactic — but baked in the very flattening it was meant to fix, treating dozens of distinct traditions as one undifferentiated 'other' shelf.