1887
If you’ve ever been a tango DJ—and many of my friends DJ regularly—you know that most tango tracks last about three minutes. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but on average it comes out to roughly three minutes. I took the first random 100 favorite tangos from my collection and got 297 minutes. So what’s going on here? Why is three minutes such a magnetic number—do dancers just like dancing exactly three minutes per song?
In fact, it all started with a man named Emile Berliner. He was a German-born American inventor who, in 1887, came up with recording sound on flat discs (before that, audio was recorded on cylinders—almost like a street organ). His new patented device was called the Gramophone. Recording and storing audio on cylinders was inconvenient, complicated, and expensive. Pressing flat discs and storing them was much easier and cheaper. The success was so great that the original trademark Gramophone quickly became a generic term, and almost any device that played audio from a disc was called a gramophone.
Remarkably, this coincided with the birth and popularization of tango. Thanks to Berliner’s invention, we can hear tango from those years—including the Golden Age—the way it was captured then. Almost all the tango we know and hear at milongas was originally recorded on those flat discs. And where do the three minutes come in? For several decades the main format was the 10-inch shellac disc (a natural resin), and the technology ran at around 78 rpm (standardized industry-wide in the mid-1920s). One side of such a disc held three minutes or a little more of music—one track per side. Musicians and orchestras had to adapt and create arrangements that fit into those same three minutes.
From that era also comes the term “album”: record companies sold sets of 78-rpm discs bound like a book, much like a photo album—hence the name. Vinyl would be invented later; vinyl long-playing records only became standard in the late 1940s–1950s.
That’s why almost all our favorite tango music has come down to us in the sound in which it was recorded—on 10-inch shellac discs, one track per side. It’s also fun to note that shellac is a natural resin produced by tiny insects in Thailand and India. So thank you, little bugs—and thank you, Emile Berliner, for inventing the Gramophone at just the right time.