Formal genre classifications within global music catalogs separate works into broad categories that center origin and cultural context, and the classification Music/World Music exists to group works that draw from cultural and regional musical traditions rooted outside of the mainstream Western commercial music industry. This classification was developed to address longstanding gaps in standard genre frameworks that failed to account for the rich diversity of musical practices originating across the Global South, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and other regions whose musical output was often sidelined by genre structures built exclusively to center North American and European commercial music. Every work placed within the world music category carries a clear marker of its national origin, a core piece of contextual information that grounds the work in the cultural landscape that shaped it, rather than forcing it to fit into ill-fitting mainstream genre boxes.