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You can sort the content by genre, country, artist or album. For example, you can look up Brazil, select Suba as the artist, and listen to the tracks on a couple of albums. You can hear one minute for free, but MP3 tracks cost $0.99 to download.

Featured artists range from the oud-playing Palestinian Marwan Abado to South Africa's Zulu Mobb, consisting of two rappers from Soweto.

'World music is a natural extension of nationalgeographic.com's rich multimedia

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experience,' said the VP of National Geographic Digital Media, Betsy Scolnik, 'World music fans around the world will be able to listen and learn in one digital experience.'

The site's self-declared aim is to 'use the language of music as a medium to tell the stories of the world.'

You can find National Geographic World Music at worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com

The music back-end is powered Calabash Music, which is described as a Fair Trade music company. What this means, according to National Geographic, is that its business model is based on artists from developing nations getting a fairer crack of the whip. In other words, world music via the Internet for those with a social conscience.

The National Geographic Society is a nonprofit scientific and educational organisation, founded in 1888 to 'increase and diffuse geographic knowledge'.