This dissertation examines new ways in which tango, Argentina's “national” genre of popular music, has been drawn upon and used as a cultural and/or economic resource following the devastating Argentine economic crisis of late 2001, focusing on how the transformation of musical politics has affected the conceptualization and practice of musical form. Based on data gathered over more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires, the dissertation is divided into five chapters. Following a general introduction on the historical, musical, and political context of the study, the second chapter investigates how the cultural industries, especially the local music industry, emerged as a priority for the city government of Buenos Aires in the wake of the economic crisis, tracing the formation of such policies through the city's engagement with international debates on “cultural diversity.” Chapter three studies how cultural policies based on these diversity discourses have been put into practice, taking the government-produced Buenos Aires International Music Fair—a spectacular event designed to increase both the cultural significance and economic value of local music production, including tango—as an ethnographic case. Chapter four explores the cultural politics of contemporary tango music against core debates regarding the status of “the popular” in Latin America, analyzing how specific musical features and stylistic details of some contemporary tango maps onto broader patterns of musical, cultural, and social inclusion and exclusion in Argentina today. Chapter five considers the work of TangoVia Buenos Aires, a non-profit arts organization that has taken advantage of the city's newfound interest in forming public-private partnerships following the economic crisis, arguing that the viability of such partnerships, from the perspective of both the private entrepreneurs and their public partners, has required a substantial revision of historically entrenched aesthetic ideologies regarding tango in Argentina. By locating tango music and culture within the broader managerial regimes that frame the genre as it is practiced in Buenos Aires today, I bridge disciplinary modes of thinking about the power of aesthetic values, cultural practices, and the workings of cultural policy and the cultural industries within the contexts of economic neoliberalism and cultural globalization.