Come into our world: with the right exposure, world music is displaying mass-market credentials.(Focus)

The periodic runaway success of releases by the likes of Buena Vista Social Club and Ladysmith Black Mambazo highlights the thriving mass market for world music titles. Yet, as anyone active in the field will testify, the crushing problem is finding ways to reach that audience.

One initiative which is raising the profile of the sector as a whole, let alone some its leading artists, is Radio Three's World Music Awards. Following the announcement of the results earlier this month, the station is staging a concert in Edinburgh on March 9 featuring some of the winners which will be broadcast on Radio Three (March 13 at 3pm) and BBC 4 (March 12 at 9pm). Not only will this bring world music to a wider listening audience, but it also provides a useful hook for retailers to bring attention to world music in-store through promotions featuring a string of new and catalogue titles. Prime among them is the official Awards compilation being produced by Union Square through its Manteca imprint.

"We approached the BBC after the first awards ceremony in 2002 about taking on the winners compilation and they agreed," says Union Square marketing director Steve Bunyan. "Our first awards release did extremely well, as retailers have been looking for entry level albums to give the public some idea of what they can find out there. We expect it to be considerably up on last year's sales given the increased profile of the awards."

Although the Radio Three Awards are relatively new, retailers appear to be welcoming the occasion to highlight an area of music that sometimes gets lost among all the other product on offer. "World music is holding its own in the marketplace and sells twice as much as blues and folk combined--the Radio Three Awards are now part of our marketing calendar," says Simon Coe, world music buyer for the Virgin Megastores. "We're planning on doing a rack in all our megastores featuring all the winners for four weeks and we'll have the awards compilation racked front-of-store for at least two weeks."

And it is not just the music specialists who have found that they can sell quality world titles with sufficient marketing back-up. "When we recently decided to TV-advertise the most recent album by Souad Massi, the most successful slot we ran was during ER," says Jo Ashbridge, co-managing director of Wrasse Records. "We'd sold her album in Sainsbury's on the strength of the TV advertising and the sales reaction was so immediate that they kept the album prominently racked the following week."

Indeed Massi--who has been ...