This article reflects on the contemporary phenomenon of ‘world music’, exploring how the commodified genre has developed and been marketed since the 1980s, and the implications that the genre has both for academic studies of music and culture and for the continuing sustainability of local music and cultural diversity. The article starts with a discussion of the bifurcation of world music between the commercial (a mix of relatively popular commodified forms that are often hybrid collaborations) and ethnographically rooted music (often archive or field recordings of ‘authentic’ traditions), and the challenges faced by the latter in a market dominated by the former. It utilizes critiques by Outhwaite, Said, Moretti, Adorno and others of Eurocentricism, orientalism and popular culture to position comments by, and products produced for, the world music community. Commentary is informed from a variety of sources - from musicians and producers, published texts, and from an Internet blog that began in response to my initial discussion of this topic in my 2008 inaugural professorial lecture at the University of London. Commentary builds a perspective on world music as particular mixes of the familiar and exotic/ Other that are typically experienced - using concepts elaborated by Guillermo Gómez‐Pena and Anahid Kassabian - as ‘lite difference’ through ‘audio tourism’. A chronological perspective that begins with the promotion of gramophones in the early twentieth century is offered to show how world music has developed. And Korea provides a case study of the effort one country’s music industry is making to enter the commodified world music arena, noting how Korean funding agencies increasingly move from support of the iconoclastic traditional music (kugak) to contemporary genres such as the western‐meets‐eastern kugak fusion. The article ends by asking what the future might hold, and whether, as the recorded music industry declines, local music can continue to be championed. KCI Citation Count: 0