The field of global World Music has grown over decades to encapsulate a vast range of culturally rooted sonic works that draw from longstanding creative traditions tied to specific national and regional identities, creating a shared framework for works that might otherwise remain outside the mainstream of global popular music circulation. The early frameworks that laid the groundwork for World Music as a recognized genre began to take shape in the mid-to-late 20th century, when curators, audiences, and creators began to push back against the Western-centric bias that dominated global music industries, sidelining works from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania in favor of output from North America and Western Europe. These early efforts to categorize and elevate non-Western creative works eventually coalesced into the formal genre classification of World Music, a category that continues to evolve to include both traditional and contemporary works that carry distinct cultural ties to their places of origin.