The success of the expression “world music,” a commercial label coined during the 1980s to refer to certain types of music, provokes an inquiry into the conditions underlying its invention and success, and to question about how these types are brought together and how this music is made. An analysis of a limited corpus of pieces circulating under the genre “world music” leads to the building of a typology. This music does not correspond to any homogeneous form; it derives completely from a combination of pre-existing elements. This art of making combinations, whereby the imagination spreads its wings in the contemporary world, explores a changing world, arouses a feeling of exercising control over it and provides a means for escaping from it. “World music” thus turns out to be an instrument for construing a new, emergent world. Sociological and musicological approaches must be brought together to understand how this music operates and how imagining this new world works through music.