The Radio Tangopostale Story

Radio Tangopostale takes its name from Tangopostale – Festival International de Tango de Toulouse which celebrated its 17th edition in July 2026.

But if you do a websearch for Radio Tangopostale – in spite of what your friendly AI bot may tell you – there are only two active links : a Facebook page which shares tango news and updates on the Tangopostale Festival; a YouTube channel which posts videos and shares playlists mainly featuring new tango orchestras and performances.

I hear you now : What? You mean Radio Tangopostale is not a radio I can listen to ? Effectively, even though there are regular posts via Facebook and YouTube, the fact is that Radio Tangopostale stopped functioning as an online radio in June 2016.

Here is the brief story of how it all happened.

A story in three chapters

Radio Tangopostale can be told simply in three chapters.

Chapter One. The name first appeared in June 2011 as a short-term online support for a promotional jingle announcing the 3rd edition of the Tangopostale Festival. In three languages, the jingle created by Pascale Van Der Ostende, communications manager for the festival at the time, named the guest artists over a musical backing track. Laurent Lardereau, a friend of the festival who already had several online radios of various sorts to his name, pointed us towards the Radionomy online platform which hosted radio stations and took care of royalties due for all the music broadcast in return for advertising space. He asked me to send him files of the music we wanted to use and he helped us create a short programme sequence which played on repeat alternating jingles and tracks by the groups invited to the festival that year : Marcelo Mercadante y su quinteto, Gabriel Vallejo Quartet et Orquesta Tipica Imperial. The online support was taken down at the end of Tangopostale 2011, but Radio Tangopostale was born.

Chapter Two. The concept was used again in 2012 with the help of Paula Loubet and Clara Labrousse, two students on work placements with the festival, who I gave the files for our new online broadcast sequence. For this second version, we decided to keep our jingle announcing the lineup for Tangopostale 2012, still in three languages, plus a selection of music mixing classic tango and tracks from our guest musicians :  Tango Grua, Alfonso Pacin & Eleonora Eubel, Orquesta Silbando, La Andariega and Astillero. With more than 2,000 visits over 10 days – in the faraway times when such scores still impressed people – the communications team were more than happy.

Chapter Three. In 2013, encouraged by Hubert Lelong, our festival website manager,  I accepted full responsibility for Radio Tangopostale. The general idea was still to promote the festival with that year’s jingle announcing guests Derrotas Cadenas, El Cachivache, Obsesion Tango and Quinteto Negro La Boca. But I also had a longer look at how to get fuller use of what Radionomy was offering. Why not try to maintain Radio Tangopostale online beyond the festival?

In fact, the Radionomy‘s guidelines for producers explained that the number of music files we were allowed to place in our music library increased with the number of listeners. These were the files which we attributed to various pods which were assigned to specific time-slots in our weekly programmes. More than one pod was required for each slot and an artificially intelligent application combined files from the various pods so that the mix was always different but always sounded good. All you needed was to be careful how you filled the pods to get good flow for the radio. Starting out, any radio suffered from lack of variety but, if you could just attract listeners, you could improve the quality by being allowed to use more tracks and enrich the variety of what people heard. I liked the idea and decided to take up the challenge.

So Radio Tangopostale became a regular, lasting online webradio broadcasting continuously from June 2013 until June 2016. To complete the brand image, a visual was created by Lucas Eubel Frontini, tango bass player, and amateur graphic designer – just take a look at his impressive visuals for promoting Silbando, the tango orchestra he regularly plays with, by clicking HERE.

Listeners around the world

It was possible to tune in to our programme 24/7 from anywhere, at a time when the switch from computer to smartphone was just beginning, making the 8,760 hours of tango a tempting proposition. Gradually, over a three-year period, the musical selection on offer from Radio Tangopostale driven by the slogan “We like tango – all sorts of tango” found its audience as the numbers issued by Radionomy, and a place on the selection of tango stations offered by the TuneIn Radio app, confirmed. On June 16, 2015, for the second anniversary of Radio Tangopostale, the online counter had registered more than 190,000 connections in the previous 12 months with a total 83,000 hours of active listening. Scores varied from country to country and the active listening time was given for each one.

As we look through the list of the main countries reached, France (22,200 hours) was clearly our audience base, followed by Germany (9,700), the USA (7,000) and Japan (6,400). There was then a group with active hours in the 2000s : Switzerland (2,900), Canada and Italy (2600) and the UK (2,400). At 1,800 hours came Colombia, Mexico and The Netherlands, with Spain at 1,700, followed by Brazil and Belgium et 1,300, then Russia and Poland at 1,000 hours.

What about Argentina, the country people immediately associate with tango? FM radio already gave listeners all the quality classic tango they could want via the public radio station La 2×4. For those who wanted new tango online, there was Radio CAFF created by violinist Federico Terranova in 2003 and relaunched Germán Marcos in 2014. Nevertheless, Radio Tangopostale‘s mix of classic and new tango managed an honourable 2,500 heures of active listening in 2015.

Here is the programme schedule which listeners were tuning in for during the period in question.

Radio Silence

These results were exciting and the range of listeners was something unexpected. Too good to be true? Well, things took a different turn in 2016. No problem concerning the number of listeners but rather with Radionomy. In June 2016, this came to a head via the chatter on the producers’ forum where people raised worrying issues and began to question new features in their broadcast contracts.

Issue 1 : Broadcast closure in certain countries. It had become impossible to connect from certain countries (Turkey and Germany, for example). One radio station based in Taiwan was inaccessible to listeners in Taiwan. The same problem had occured in Chile. These closures were slowly gaining momentum.

Issue 2 : Poorer connection quality for listeners. Radio silence from Radionomy on this one. Remember that, in 2016, most people were still connecting to webradios via their home computers. They knew what to expect from their own equipment so, when there was a deterioration in with a previously good service without other services being affected, they knew where the trouble was coming from. For producers, this was a problem because no listeners meant no right to continue with Radionomy who hosted in exchange for advertising space. I had received several messages from Radio Tangopostale listeners on poor connections.

Issue 3 : Royalty payments concerning broadcast content. The initial agreement with Radionomy clearly stated that choice of music was up to producers and that all royalty payments would be covered by revenue earned from sales of advertising space. Producers were beginning to ask whether royalty payments were really being covered by Radionomy or whether we would all be shortly receiving large bills in our e-mails. Again, no clear answer on this question.

Along with these worrying issues, there were new features in the broadcast contracts which drew comment.

New Feaure 1 : The same artist could only be played once every 45 minutes. This one did get an explanation. Too many artists had been opening webradios to promote only their own music which played non-stop. This basically gave them cheap publicity. The 45-minute rule had been introduced 4 months earlier and producers knew why : a quarrel between record companies, Radionomy and rights clearinghouse organizations in the U.S¹ This ruled out any possiblity of airing a feature on a particular artist. For Radio Tangopostale, that posed another problem : it made it impossible to play tandas, the traditional dancefloor sequeuene. Grrr! At the time, I was talking to DJ-BYC Bernardo about putting together a playlist for a full tango ball 0for dancers broadcast live by Radio Tangopostale. That was now mission impossible.

New Feature 2 : The requirement for producers to be able to justify real ownership of each track played, whereas proof of a copy made from an original had been enough previously. That meant we could only upload tracks for which we could supply proof of purchase. This formula came from a comment by the moderator for Radionomy responding to a question from a producer concerned about sourcing of uploads. Everybody remembered the scandal surrounding the Napster peer-to-peer file-sharing software launched in 1999 which put endless illegal mp3 copies of tracks in circulation, so understandably there were concerns about copyright infringement. On the other hand, almost all the music on Radio Tangopostale came from my personal DJ collection built up over years including records bought in record shops, at tango festivals around France, or on trips to Buenos Aires. I certainly couldn’t produce receipts as proof of purchase because I hadn’t kept any. The remaining uploaded tracks came from two sources : fellow DJs and collectors who had records which were unobtainable otherwise ; artists or their agents who occasionally gave, posted or sent me digital copies of CDs for inclusion on Radio Tangopostale. I could justify the latter, which was pardoxical because I didn’t actually buy any of those tracks. Joking aside, this new feature was not good news.

Taking down Radio Tangopostale

The climate generated by all these discussions was far from reassuring, as you can see. And Radionomy wasn’t communicating very openly about the situation, simply answering questions as they came. This suggested some sort of legal entanglement which is now public knowledge.

Since February 2016, the platform – which was also the prosperous owner of Winamp and Shoutcast – had been threatened with court action by Sony Music who questioned the validity of the mode of finance used by Radionomy to offer digital support for free broadcast of copyrighted music by a total of 57,000 radios. As explained in this article published by Music Business Worldwide on March 2nd 2016, Sony was demanding $150 000 for each unauthorised track broadcast.

Sony and Radionomy eventually settled out of court with minimum publicity, but in June 2016 the producers’ forum discussions mentioned above were a measure of the consequences of the agreement reached by both parties in the settlement. There were too many negative points for me to continue. on June 5th 2016 I made up my mind to end my association with Radionomy. This meant, after 3 years online, Radio Tangopostale was taken down.

Is that all?

So there you have the outline of the Radio Tangopostale story. Thanks for reading. And if you were among the listeners, thanks for your support. It was a creative experience, but keeping it going took enormous amounts of time and energy. No longer needing to do that left a gap, but I have to say that there was also relief.

This article doesn’t go into too much detail about the choices of music and they were clearly a major part of the project. In fact, 3 years spent immersed in tango and folk music from Argentina and Uruguay completely changed the way I listen to this type of music or indeed all music.

That’s why I have decided to take you behind the contents of the Radio Tangopostale programmes named in the schedule shown in this post with a second post which focuses on the music. Some time soon.

Meanwhile, you’re welcome to follow Radio Tangopostale on Facebook and YouTube. I couldn’t bring myself to shut them down because there is still so much tango out there waiting to be heard.

1. Presumably organisations such as ASCAP and BMI. ↩︎