What Is the World Music Market?

Someone just posed this question on an on-line forum, so I'm double-dipping and putting my response here, too:

I'm not so sure it's a demographic so much as a sub-cultural inclination. The intrinsic problem with the "World Music" category is that it means music from wherever you're not. Not only does it jumble soukous together with clog dancing, qawwali, and gamelan (although we're okay with that), but also from a where-the-consumer-is-at marketing standpoint the designation turns the whole confused kaboodle into field recordings. That's a deceptively difficult threshold for people with dollars to cross. People who view "World Music" as a discrete category may dabble a bit on totems like Buena Vista Social Club (good album though it is), but unless they're well versed in a reasonably broad range of traditions on their own home turf, they're not likely to become real "consumers" of World Music, as such, because beyond distinguishing "World Music" from the familiar (read: "popular" music), they'll be ill-disposed to distinguish the various alien forms from among themselves. Nothing makes you want to buy Congolese music in quantity, for example, more than hearing enough of it to understand just how much of it there is and how radically different its practitioners are from each other. Then, what sounds like pop music in Kinshasa has more than a shot at sounding like pop music elsewhere, because you'll start hearing stuff from within the foreign context that you don't like as well as do like and you'll have some idea why. If people in the US heard soukous all the time, it would sound like pop music here, but they don't, they won't, and wishing won't make it otherwise, so it doesn't. By definition, therefore, I'd say the World Music demographic couldn't be a World Music audience only -- it would have to comprise people disposed to listen to (and buy) anything and everything. Maybe because they just can't help it, or something.