Here’s everyone’s favorite useful or useless facts about tango events: the statistics from TMD.
As of 2023-06-17 TMD has a total of 2576 events listed (and that number grows every week!).
| 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 6 | 5 | 128 | 160 | 212 | 245 | 254 | 205 | 212 | 264 | 261 | 135 | 262 | 217 | 8 |
Number of events
The number of events listed on TMD is still increasing every year, even though TMD never has a full picture of all events. We guess that more than 80% of marathons are actually listed, but the coverage for Encuentros, Festival/itos and Camps is much less than that. Additionally, the event categorization was only introduced in 2017. Category data before 2017 has been guessed algorithmically using the data that was available in the database about these events (text, metadata like “food offered” or “workshops”).
If you closely look at the images above, you see a dip in events in 2020. Of course: COVID-19 hit, and tango was almost dead or dormant. The following picture shows this effect better. Or does it?
You can clearly see that fewer events are in the database over the course of 2020. But the first lockdowns were in March 2020, and all tango was dead afterward? Not quite – and also not quite up-to-date on TMD. Yes, some events were moved into the summertime, and some were canceled, but the TMD database does not reflect the full damage the scene suffered: nobody was keeping track of which event was actually canceled, or moved. So please take this all with a grain of salt or two, and a shot glass of vodka to erase the memories.
How did the tango fare in 2022 and 2023 (so far?): I think we can see how the total number of events increased again in 2022, and that events were pushed a bit back into summer. But since fall 2022 we are back to ‘normal’. And you can also see that the numbers for 2023 are probably not yet fully complete: there was a big rush of events in March-May — why should that not continue to the end of the year?
Distribution of events during the year
Are there months when more events happen? Are there even weekends with more events?
Clearly there are. The following two pictures analyze all 2561 events in the database (2010-2024): We can see that Marathons have crowded months in April-June, and September/October, with November to February being the least crowded. When it comes to more specific dates, we can also see that for example over these years there are almost never events on the second and third weekend in December. Interestingly the only month that has a major spike on the “fifth weekend” is December: New Year’s events, anyone?
Where are these events?
TMD covers mostly events in Europe, but not only. However, from the data we are looking at: which countries do you think are the Tango countries of Europe?
You guessed right: Italy and Germany. Here’s the charts for 2018:
