When Radio Tehran published its programming schedule in 1940 it clearly assumed multiple audiences, but not multiple “Iranian” audiences. It broadcasted news in Persian and foreign languages, and, offered programing in “Western” and “Iranian” music. However, it did not broadcast in any minority language (Arabic being construed as “foreign”). By 1958, its programming schedule had changed. Different forms of popular and classical Persian music were in the schedule. Programming seemed aimed at different “classes” of people (e.g. industrial workers, tribes) and interests (religious, some minority cultures). Much of this was in response to the geo-politics and related domestic upheavals of World War II and the Cold War. However, press, diplomatic, published archival and oral history accounts suggest there was something more at work – something more widespread, less overtly political: the personal regulation of listening environments at home and in public. As much as the Pahlavi state tried to cultivate national infrastructure for radio listening, it is also true that people did not receive these efforts passively. Middle class households that could afford to, set aside time and space within their households for radio listening, integrating and prioritizing their consumption of Radio Tehran broadcasts along with other ways controlling the listening culture of their households -- with live musical performance and gramophones, for example. These private listening environments created avenues to receive public communication from outside, but they were not unregulated avenues. Similarly, it is clear that people brought their own conceptual “filters” into public listening environments (e.g. cafes, bazars, schools). Iranian state records and British diplomatic reports from the mid-20th Century struggled to rate the efficacy of propaganda with respect to these complex patterns of (mostly public) listening behavior, even when such behavior could not be fairly described as political or oppositional. The more diverse broadcasting schedule of the late 1950s, therefore, can be understood also as the reflection of a more sophisticated of the diverse listening culture in Iran and an attempt to forge a more common “national” listening culture by engaging that diversity. At one essential level, it seems to have worked: radio seems to have become valued as a way for ordinary people to gain some direct access to the political elite -- to be spoken to, if not listened to.