Contemporary World Music

Contemporary World Music brochure cover

“Buffering is quick, and sound clarity is excellent. The database is well organized and easy to use. . . .Highly recommended. All users.”—CHOICE

Contemporary World Music is the largest and most comprehensive streaming audio collection of contemporary world music.  It currently provides streaming access to over 200,000 tracks and is growing regularly as new recordings are added.

The most comprehensive audio collection available

Contemporary World Music features music from 169 countries and over 800 labels from around the world.

  • Focus on contemporary genres, such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz.
  • Also traditional music—Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more.
  • Many titles are encyclopedic in their breadth of coverage. For example, The Voice of the People from the Topic label, a 20-volume series of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh traditional music, is here in its entirety
  • Great complement to the more traditional recordings in Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries.

Contemporary World Music provides coverage in breadth and depth for world music, and is essential for musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, folklore, and performance studies.

  • Over 1,000 distinct genres and sub-genres available
  • Over 1,400 cultural groups represented
  • Data on 100,000s of artists and ensembles

Great Recordings
We select recordings to feature the best of world music:

  • Acclaimed world music labels, including the entire catalogs of Topic, Playasound, Budamusique, Air Mail Music, Manuiti, Crossing Records, Lyrichord World Music, and others.
  • Recordings from the world’s great artists and ensembles, such as Ali Jihad Racy, Adama Dramé, Carlos Do Carmo, Parisa, Tran Quang Haï, Katrien Delavier, Hussein El Masry, Rassegna, Oedo Sukeroku Taiko, El Son Entero, Simon Shaneem, I Wayan Sadra, and Fawzy Al-Aiedy.

 

Relevant to a broad range of studies
The recordings in Contemporary World Music address a broad range of topics that are relevant to a wide range of studies including world history, sociology and multi-cultural studies.  For example:

  • Racism, fair trade, and poverty, as expressed through   the songs of Yé Lassina Coulibaly of Burkina Faso
  • Social injustice in the music of Henri Dikongue of Cameroon
  • Religious freedom, from Françoise Atlan & Moneim Oudwan (a Palestinian and Jewish duo).

Unique access points drive Discovery
Explore over 2,600 distinct instrument categories using a graphical interface based on a 3-level variant of the Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification.

 

Powerful Teaching Resources
Our collections include a playlist functionality to enable educators to create, annotate and share thematic playlists of recordings to support their teaching needs.

Example playlists based around key musical concepts
Our customers actively use playlists to support teaching

Key Features of Contemporary World Music

  • Advanced Search: additional options include cultural group, genre, instrument, ensemble, place and date of recording
  • CD Quality: audio streaming up to CD quality (320kbps) at no extra cost
  • Mobile Access: stream to your mobile device / smartphone
  • Liner Notes: full set of liner notes for this unique collection
  • Custom Audio Clips: New feature from Summer 2012!   Users can create, and share clips from all audio tracks.
  • Embeddable Audio: New feature from Summer 2012!  All audio can be embedded into 3rd party websites.
  • Custom Playlists: create, annotate and share playlists. Access a library of playlists created by other users, including themed playlists created by our editor.
  • Permanent URLs: all albums, tracks, clips and playlists can be cited on permanent URLs.
  • Cross-search: audio can be cross-searched alongside our related video, scores and reference material to provide a powerful tool for music research.