Ep. 39 (1944 p2) of Danceable Tangos of the Year

Papageno, one of Hungary's leading musical culture magazines, made a longer interview with me about the story of Argentine Tango Radio, tango DJing, and argentine tango culture in general. For those reading Hungarian (or feeling brave to experiment with Google Translate), the interview can be reached here:
papageno.hu/intermezzo/2022/03/gyenis-balazs-magyarorszag-nagyhatalom-a-tango-vilagaban

For several years I had a covert TTVTTM tanda-structured milonga stream running under ArgentineTangoRadio.com, and last March I pointed my public backup player to it, with the intention to provide milonga music for home-constrained couples, until real milongas reopen. This milonga stream was quite successful, and I received many fan emails from all around the world for it. Thanks for listening and taking the time to show appreciation!

Well, with a few exceptions around the world (Russia, China etc.) real milongas are yet to reopen, but recent changes in how my backup server is managed and paid for forced me to rethink whether it is managable to continue with double servers. Unfortunately I needed to conclude that at the recent levels of patronage received by the radio I can no longer maintain a backup server separate from the main radio stream. So, until an unspecified time in the future, the milonga stream is going to be closed and the backup player on the main site is going to serve the main, non-tanda-structured stream as well. Sorry, but thanks for understanding.

But hey, the main stream is still awesome, isn't it? :)

Although the history of broadcasting goes back to the end of the 19th century, with early pioneers, such as the Hungarian Telefon Hírmondó (1893-1944) leading the way, one of the first commercial radio broadcasts in the world took place 100 years ago today, in Argentina. On the 27th of August, 1920, the Buenos Aires based Radio Argentina Society made its first radio broadcast, a live performance of Wagner's Parsifal:

This is only the fifth year that Argentine Tango Radio, afaik the most listened-to online tango radio, is humming along the wires. It has been a bumpy few years, but I hope not many of the roadblocks were noticed by our listeners. With survivors' pride, we raise our hat today to celebrate the history of radio broadcasting in Argentina and in the world!

Yesterday I hosted the worlds' first Live Virtual Video Milonga. Thanks for everyone who joined and many thanks for all of those who helped spreading the word (especially Endre Szeghalmi, co-organizer of the event, and also Gyuri Horvath and Winston Veerender)!

Around four hundred people joined in at various times, but the maximal concurrent attendance was around 100. Given that only five hours passed between the announcement and the opening of the virtual gates, this was a great turnout. And we certainly had a lot of fun!

The majority of attendees were passive listeners, but a good number of dancers turned on their cameras, which made it much more enjoyable! I now think 4 hours was maybe too long for such an event, it spread out the attendance, and only few couples could dance through the whole thing, given that there was no opportunity for partner change. (Although we don't know - again, many joined without cameras!)

Hosting it was super exhausting, keeping the music running, chatting with people (both in public and private), changing the spotlighted video feed for entertainment, etc. required non-stop attention. Some of these tasks should be delegated to others. But I enjoyed it tremendously!

I also made a few screenshots, although I'm afraid this is going to be super selective, and I missed most of the action.. At any rate, here we go:

Dancing couples:

Solo dancers:

People working on performance skills:

Drinking along:

Just checking in (there were many-many more, sorry):

All good things come to an end:

Join (hopefully) hundreds of tangueros and tangueras tonight in a Live Virtual Video Milonga, hosted on Zoom! Turn on your camera, dance in front of it to the online edition of Milonga Jueves from Budapest, watch everyone else doing the same, or just watch and chat with dancers from all around the world! The more colorful, the merrier!

Tonight's event (March 19th) starts at 8:30pm CET and is planned to end at 0:30am CET. The link to current and future events can be found in the Video Milonga Calendar. The music will be provided by DJ Balazs. Gender balancing is not guaranteed :) .

All you need to do is to install the freely available Zoom.us Client for Meetings application (on your phone, tablet, laptop etc.) and then click on the link above. Currently I can host an event for up to 500 participants, but if this works well, we can hopefully go up to 10,000 next time..

The event is free to join. To become a patron of Argentine Tango Radio, follow this link.

EDIT: the event went well, some experiences: https://balazstango.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-worlds-first-live-virtual-video.html .

Due to the closure of real milongas I decided to make public my so-far hidden milonga playlist stream: you can listen to it either through the small red "backup stream" play button on the Argentine Tango Radio main page. The milonga playlist stream is semi-randomized (the selection of pre-programmed tandas is random, but bound to a scheme conjured for consecutive ~3.5 hour long milongas), and varied enough to not repeat any songs for at least 10 hours. For many reasons it can not substitute a real tango DJ - i.e. not knowing the audience the selection errs on the rhythmical side, the song selection is fairly conservative, etc. etc. - but when you want to have a mini-milonga with your significant other in your house quarantine, it will do.

Only a few friends knew about the existence of this milonga playlist stream. I created it two years ago to facilitate open air milonga flashmobs (where couples could listen to the music on their phones with a shared headset), but never publicized it.. [EDITED CONTENT] but, until the real milongas can't open up again, I reassigned my backup server to this stream.

If you just want to listen to danceable tango music, please, continue to do so on the usual Argentine Tango Radio stream; the musical selection is much more varied, and it does make a difference for me. Thanks.

Enjoy, and stay safe!

I estimate that no more than 300,000 people dance tango worldwide.

Let me share my method of estimation for the total number of tango dancers (from which my criteria of being a "tango dancer" - used only for the purpose of this calculation - also becomes clear). I started with trying to figure out the approximate number of milongas worldwide. Fortunately there is a long-established website dedicated to collecting all milongas worldwide called milongas-in.com. At the time of this writing there are 2,419 milongas listed on this site, the majority as a regular weekly milonga. Unfortunately the quality of listings is not even and/or not very up-to-date, so for large cities known for their vivid tango life I did some manual search and correction using local milonga calendars. For example for larger cities in Argentina and Uruguay milongas-in.com seems to be off with a factor of ~4, with the exception of Buenos Aires where it is off with a factor of 8. In larger tango centers in Europe (Berlin, Istanbul etc) milongas-in.com seems to be off with a factor of ~1.5-2, while in smaller tango cities / countries it even seems to overestimate the number of weekly milongas. I suspect the difference in listing quality is related to the intensity of tango life in given destinations (in places with less intense tango life organizers may pay more attention to be listed and/or there is a higher turnover rate for milongas resulting in more defunct milongas staying listed on the site). So I decided to adjust the milongas-in.com numbers with a factor of 8 for Spanish speaking countries and with a factor of 2 for all other locations, plus added an upper estimation for the number of tango festivals / marathons / encuentros / camps per week (equating each of them with 5 milongas, or, as we will later on see, 250 people). As a result we get that there are ~6000 milongas per week worldwide.

If we further guesstimate that an average milonga is attended by ~50 people (which I believe to be an upper estimate for the average attendance) and assume that on average a dancer attends a milonga once a week (another estimation resulting in an exaggerated figure, for the harder core tangueros/tangueras who make up the significant portion of the milonga population dance more frequently, while those who dance less than, say, once a month, may not quite qualify as a "tango dancer") we arrive at the final upper estimation of 300,000 people dancing tango worldwide.

Given the upper estimations the true number of active tango dancers is probably less than 300,000, maybe significantly so. On the other hand there is clearly more interest in Argentine tango dance music than what is apparent from milonga attendance. For instance Argentine Tango Radio has ~500,000 listeners from ~70,000 unique IP addresses a month; if these 70,000 listeners were all drawn from the pool of active tango dancers that would mean that roughly every 4th active tango dancer is also a listener of the radio. While this would be quite nice, I believe it is rather the case that there is a large number of people who like to listen to tango dance music but is not (yet?) attending milongas.

Another number indicating a much larger interest in tango comes from Youtube statistics. For instance the video for the Argentine tango flash mob I organized also picks up ~300,000 viewers each month. I doubt that all active tango dancers watch this video once a month; rather, there is a large untapped potential of people who are interested in Argentine tango but don't get to the point of attending milongas.

So, let's reach out!

I realized that it's relatively straightforward to create a (downsampled quality) Youtube playlist from the episodes of "Danceable Tangos of the Year". It may contain advertisements served by Youtube, but if this is your preferred format.. enjoy!

Argentine Tango Radio is now available in four additional language localizations: Greek, Italian, Serbian, and Turkish! Thanks to the translation help of Nina, Giulia, Maša, Anastasija, and Gizem, the number of language localizations is in the double digits now!

I also implemented some long-overdue under-the-hood changes - replaced some broken embedded objects and moved the site under https. For the latter I needed to enlist the help of Cloudflare, which has its up-and-downsides; I still don't know what to do with certain broken link-redirections and site certificate issues, but hopefully can get around them soon.

Enjoy the new-old Argentine Tango Radio website!

Although I recently moved to London, ArgentineTangoRadio.com keeps humming and in December 2018 more than half million tango lovers tuned in!

During the third full calendar year of Argentine Tango Radio we reached almost five million listeners, 60 percent increase compared with 2017. The podcast version of "Danceable Tangos of the Year", our weakly programming on the radio, is still the most listened content related to Argentine tango on the internet archive, standing at more than 100,000 listenings.

Although I still spend more on the radio than I receive from advertisements and donations, let me take a moment to thank the generous 2018 patronage of the Tűz family and Derek Smith, as well as that of Edward Johnson, Endre Szeghalmi, Hartmut Röhrich, Markus Frees, Mira Vos, Robert Arthur, Róbert Rózsa-Fekete, Terry Bauch, and Toni Hanner.

Happy new year and happy listening!