For the music fan, the thrill is often in the discovery. There are few greater pleasures than picking up a mysterious CD, taking it home and finding that you have struck musical paydirt. There is often a gamble involved but a little research can usually make it an informed one - sometimes even a relatively safe bet.
The trick is to make use of all available indications before parting with the cash - well known names and reputations, equally reputable record labels and of course the counsel of dependable journalists and DJs who may have already done some vigorous filtering on our behalf. But even so, standing alone in a large record store tends to completely wipe your hard drive and provoke the worst kind of consumer panic. And as the shops continue to fill up with music we cannot possibly know very much about, its well worth getting all the help you can.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the bewildering racks of world music taking up more and more space in the best record stores. Not long ago, very few people would have been actively seeking out music from Ethiopia and Pakistan but times have changed. Nowadays people are looking for music rather more rewarding than anything in the charts. There is plenty of it out there - finding a way into it is the problem.
Not surprisingly, Latin music is still the biggest draw. It is accessible to most of us in that we can move to it easily, we readily recognise its beauty and we are reasonably at home with its vocabularies - even the language itself. While we may not understand Spanish or Portuguese, they are nevertheless familiar and singable. Most importantly however, in terms of the current dominance of Latin music, is that it has been deep in our popular culture for a very long time.
Long before the Buena Vista Social Club put the major labels in shock by selling over five million records, Latin grooves were already well embedded within us. In the 1930s, musicians like Duke Ellington were importing the rumba into popular jazz. And then, as musicians from Latin countries settled in North America, the music further established itself in the mainstream.
The mambo craze of the 1950s produced an extraordinary flood of mock-Latin music - serious pop and novelty records - from the likes of Rosemary Clooney and Perry Como. Even the r 'n' b and rock 'n' roll acts began to turn out their mambo hits for audiences that just loved to dance (correctly or incorrectly) to those Latin beats. These infectious rhythms also made their way into everything from the inventions of Chuck Berry to the classic Richard Berry song Louie Louie. This unbeatable garage band favourite is, after all, a simple cha-cha-cha.
In the crucial music centre of New York, salsa had enjoyed many different flowerings, but in the 1950s it was the music which propelled most of the big hits of the day.
The Puerto Rican population was growing - from 256,000 in 1950 to 614,000 in 1960 - and Latin (or Afro-Cuban) music was everywhere. Machito and Tito Puente played at the Palladium and soon, only five blocks away, the writers of the Brill Building began to base just about everything on a Latin beat. Lieber and Stoller's Hound Dog was originally a rumba, many of Pomus and Shuman's songs for the Drifters were in the same Latin territory, and soon even squeaky clean white kids were dancing, without really knowing it, to Latin grooves. For more recent "bubblegum" Latin see Geri Halliwell, Louis Bega, etc, etc.
The other big crossover happened, thanks to musicians such as Puente, when the Latin musicians began to mix with the be-boppers. When these new stars of Birdland clashed with the Mambo Kings of the Palladium the results were breathtaking. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker combining with the likes of Machito opened up a whole new universe for jazzers.
And while Mario Bauza, Perez Prado and others continued to lead their big bands to huge popular success, it was individual musicians, such as percussionist Chano Pozo, who perhaps had the greatest impact on jazz. A member of Gillespie's band in the mid-1940s, he is perhaps the biggest single influence both on jazz musicians themselves and on the Afro-Cuban Jazz acts like Mongo Santamaria and Candido.
The boogaloo (or bugalu) craze of the 1960s which re-generated many years later as Acid Jazz, has successfully transported the music through the decades - a funky, jazzy, mambo fusion made a little blacker, more soulful and more distinctively New York.
All these influences are still very audible in the hipper of the jazz-based rap and dance acts. Anybody looking for a rhythm, from the Dream Warriors to Basement Jaxx, will find much to amuse themselves in Latin music. They know it's a music which goes straight for the hips.
But the problem for the newly curious is how to tell your Mario Bauza from your Ricky Martin? And how do you take your search beyond Cuba and Brazil and into Columbia, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina? The Rough Guide to Latin Music might well be the answer - a precise 200-page pocket-guide to 100 essential CDs from a large continent.
It's a broad selection and, much to its credit, not a snobbish one. For example while Ricky Martin is not featured, Gloria Estefan is.
And that's a fair indicator that the book's heart is in the right place - Astor Piazzolla, Celia Cruz, Ibrahim Ferrer, Tito Puente, Caetano Veloso and Ruben Blades are all present and correct, but so too are Yma Sumac, Ray Barretto, Susana Baca and Victor Jara. Gather up that CD collection and you'll never leave home again.
If you're looking for music for body and soul, the Rough Guide to Latin Music will certainly show you the way. It's a book highly recommended for everybody's hip pocket.
The Rough Guide to Latin Music - 100 Essential CDs is published by Penguin at £5 in UK