The term "World Music" has been credited to ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown who coined it in the 1960s. The term became current in the 1980s as a marketing/classificatory device in the media and the music industry.

One music journalist has referred to "world music" as "someone else's pop music". Those who use of this classification display a breathtaking ignorance of the variety of music through history and around the world.

A basic actual definition of world music consists of "all the music in the world", which effectively renders the term virtually meaningless beyond marketing purposes. The term also is taken erroneously as a classification of music that combines western popular music styles with one or many genres of non-Western music that were previously described as folk music or ethnic music, however, the correct term for this style is worldbeat (or world fusion).