For Ravi Shankar, music was a sort of religion

When musicians from outside the Anglo-American pop mainstream achieve success in the West, there are conflicting reactions. Seun Kuti, the Afrobeat star, once complained to me that most world music celebrities are people who play much the same music as their peers to much the same standard and simply get lucky when a record company stumbles across them.

In some cases, musicians from Asia and Africa have to be rocketed into orbit by the boost of an association with a pop giant, even if they then drop away: thus Ladysmith Black Mambazo with Paul Simon, or Buena Vista Social Club with Ry Cooder. Another explanation is offered by the Alchian-Allen theorem, which suggests that goods exported across borders tend to be of higher quality than domestic ones. If that holds for intangibles such as music, then the explanation for the success of world musicians is that they are, simply, better.