For as long as humans have been making music, music genres have come into being and disappeared again. However, recent processes of globalization, modernization, urbanization, commodification, and the exponential growth of digital technologies, while beneficial to cultural strength in many ways, have also placed unprecedented pressure on many genres. This is particularly true of the musics of indigenous and minority peoples across the world, many of which are disappearing against the will of the communities concerned. Those genres perceived to be at immanent risk of no longer being practiced may be termed endangered, though the term is not unanimously accepted. While ethnomusicology has long concerned itself with ‘dying’ musics, renewed focus has been placed on the issues of music endangerment and vitality since the early 2000s, partly due to UNESCO’s high-profile call to action in 2003. Nowadays, scholarly investigations of situations of endangerment are often accompanied by advocacy or action, in close collaboration with the implicated communities. Approaches to supporting endangered musics are diverse, and may, for example, center on strengthening documentation, transmission processes, relevant policies, or engagement with the music industry, among other areas. Defining Endangerment In some respects, the very term endangered musics is problematic. One potential concern is that it wrongly implies an inevitable move towards extinction; another is that the term downplays or denies the natural processes of atrophy and regeneration that all cultures and cultural expressions undergo. For these reasons (among others), some ethnomusicologists prefer to frame the loss of music genres in terms of change rather than endangerment; others, adopting what they argue is a more constructive perspective, refer instead to the need to secure the ‘sustainable future’ of musics across the globe. Nevertheless, the term arguably has a place in underscoring the jeopardized state of many music genres in the contemporary world.