This paper will use the India Office Records to explore how the British Empire was concerned with radio usage throughout the Arabian Peninsula during the 1930s, which resulted in the first BBC Arabic broadcasts in history. I situate these broadcasts within the context of shifting British colonial authority during the 1930s and 1940s, when territories in the Peninsula went from being governed as western extensions of the Indian Empire to being ruled directly from London as as a part of “His Majesty’s Territories in the Near and Middle East.” Radios and other sound-playback media became popular throughout the Peninsula during this time, being imported from Europe, India, and Japan. As a result, Great Britain became an audible empire in order to counter broadcasts emanating from Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy on wireless sets throughout Arabia. The British Broadcasting Corporation was contracted to organize an Arabic language broadcast that provided news about other Arab countries and cultural content such as history lectures, religious sermons, and Arabic music to sway radio users from Axis broadcasts. In this paper, I argue that British efforts to cater to the musical tastes of listeners in Arabia uniquely highlights the region’s precarious position situated between networks of the Indian Ocean, colonial or otherwise, and the colonial geography of the “Middle East” during this time. After realizing that Italian radio engineers had hired Egyptian musicians to perform live from Bari, British intelligence officials scrambled to find their own musical content. The strategy to cater to listeners in the Peninsula seems to have taken two initial trajectories that occurred simultaneously during 1937 and 1938. The first was to broadcast Egyptian music, which was held in higher regard by British colonial officials, either through live performances or gramophone records. The second was to curate culturally “appropriate” musical content for what were British racial stereotypes of tribal Arabs and bedouins. Ultimately they opted for neither tactic and turned instead to the local recording industry and its agents, which had been active with the circulation of gramophone records and musicians between Baghdad, Aden, Bombay, and Java since the 1920s. As a critical analysis of colonial archival sources, this study reads them against the grain of historical and biographical Arabic literatures, research in sound recording archives, and interviews conducted in Gulf Arab States with musicians and record collectors.