Indonesia’s archipelagic expanse holds thousands of distinct cultural communities, each with their own longstanding creative practices that have shaped creative output across the country for generations, feeding into a global landscape of world music that amplifies these distinct, place-rooted works. World music as a genre classification brings together creative sounds from every corner of the globe, united by their grounding in regional cultural traditions that stand apart from the dominant pop, rock, and hip-hop ecosystems that dominate Western mainstream music charts and platforms. The category emerged in response to decades of systemic erasure that sidelined non-Western creative works, which major global media institutions often dismissed as too niche or too tied to local contexts to appeal to broad international audiences, locking creators out of global circulation opportunities that were extended freely to artists working in Western mainstream genres.