What do the word "Traditions" mean in the category "International"?

These are a lot of good questions.

An anecdote: When I used to work at Tower Records, we used to (jokingly) discuss putting everything in the store under "World Music" because that is really where all the music comes from (with the exception of field recordings of outer space noises and some Sun Ra albums). We realized that since people were coming through the door and likely to be interested in browsing a certain genre of music, piling it all into the category of "World Music" would be technically accurate but not helpful to the shopper.

I know David Byrne published his article "I Hate World Music" where he laid out his compelling argument around this admittedly Anglo-centric view. We may consider this in the future.

To answer your broader questions:

The term "traditions" is intended to be sort of a catch-all to group together styles of music that rely heavily on the non-contemporary/more traditional cultural musics of a region. In the database, this term has been applied to albums that are more contemporary and not necessarily focusing on the traditions of the culture. To be honest, much of the work done on these albums has been done over decades and there is plenty that could continue to be cleaned up. The term "Music" may be more applicable than "Traditions" in the way is is currently being used.

The styles under "Traditional Folk" refer to older English-language music styles (pre-1970s and 1980s when the newer post-Dylan "Contemporary Folk" came onto the scene). There are some styles (like "Political Folk" and "Irish Folk") that can encapsulate music from both traditional and contemporary eras. We opted not to add them to both categories for simplicity's sake.

Most of the times when we say "Traditional" it means "Older" and when we say "Contemporary" it means "More Recent."

 It is true that traditional music from Africa, India, Asia and everywhere else in the world is technically Folk music. We're treating this more like a rack in a record store to group similar music together as opposed to a broader ethnomusicological research textbook.

Worldbeat is really just a catch-all bucket to be used when an artist combines and crosses so many musical boundaries, there isn't a single home for the music they're creating.

There are arguments to be made (and there have been!) around the best placement for all of these different styles, especially around some of the areas you've pointed out. Celtic Folk exists in a very traditional world of pipes and pennywhistles, but also exists in a very contemporary way with modern music being made today. The music from Asia, Africa, Latin America, South America and Europe consists of very time-honored traditional musical structures, and hip-hop, electronic, dance and punk music (and everything in between).

On the whole, the categorization of music is a very loose, subjective and argument-inducing concept.

The bands who made Grunge music hated the term Grunge, and IDM ("intelligent dance music") has been widely criticized and dismissed by most artists associated with it. What we are trying to do is loosely group types of music with similar types of music, and then give some broad naming conventions to help people find that music.

Thanks for your input. On our next hair-pulling exercise where we lay all these out and try to adjust the buckets, we'll definitely re-consult this thread.

According to Wikipedia, Allmusic's C-pop (Chinese pop) includes Cantopop, Mandopop and Hokkien pop.  These styles differ by dialect, and listeners would need to be versed in a dialect to understand a C-pop (Chinese isn't a spoken language) style's lyrics when sung.  "Hokkien pop" is also known as T-pop (Taiwanese pop) because Taiwanese Hokkien is a popular dialect in Taiwan and parts of China.  So Allmusic should not have renamed "Taiwanese pop" as "Mandopop" (Mandarin pop) because they are different dialects.

P.S. Stephen, please post different topics for other genres because this topic is about international music.