A NY Times article by John Pareles about the bustling indie world-music scene is mostly about newsly released CDs, but also excavates three online destinations that any fan of the genre should know about. Two offer downloads at 99 cents per track, and one is a richly informative site with gorgeously produced streaming audio documentaries.

Calabash Music: Hi-fi samples, 99-cent downloads, and am MP3 blog. The most commercial of the three site listed here. MP3.
Smithsonian Global Sound: The Smithsonian's digital collection of archival recordings. Small but growing inventory of 99-cent tracks. Academic sorting system divides music into regions and instrument classifications, but don't let that put you off. MP3.
Afropop Worldwide: Just African, but that's saying a lot. A current hour-long documentary features Bonnie Raitt travelling in Mali and voicing her impressions of the music, with plenty of extended samples recorded live. Damn. This should be a DVD.

I'm no fan of iTMS store, as any casual reader here knows, but I do love the niched spinoffs that take the business model and apply it to music (without DRM) that is hard to find elsewhere.