‘The World is made of music.’
These two volumes are the guidebook for world music.
On YouTube, there are lots of world music videos uploaded from all over the world, which are not familiar to usual Japanese people. I sometimes download some of them and transfer them to my MP3 player. My selection from Youtube has been on a hit-or-miss basis and deviated to popular music related to my specific concerns. So, I had been searching for genealogical guide for world popular music. In 2007, these two volumes were published and I bought them soon. Though most of the descriptions are in Japanese, the artist’s name and the album title are adscripted in English with the picture of the each album’s cover. Most of the artist’s names in these volumes can be found on YouTube if you input an artist name or an album title to YouTube’s search dialog box. I picked up lots of artists from these volumes and put their names into YouTube’s search dialog box to check if there were someone whose works couldn’t be found on YouTube, but I haven't found such an example so far. On the contrary, I found that all the artists I picked up have incredibly large view counts, even though most of usual Japanese people might have not heard of even their names.
The first volume: Latin America, North America and Africa
The second volume: Europe, Asia, South Pacific, Russia and NIS
