This paper will briefly explore the cultural, political, and literary environment throughout the Gulf that encountered the BBC’s early Arabic broadcasts beginning in the late 1930s. Using both colonial and vernacular archival sources, it will demonstrate how negotiations among British officials and local subjects surrounding the broadcasts were a push and pull between aspirations for Arab unity and the realities of governing and living within a region that was effectively an extension of British India. While the late 1920s and early 1930s had already seen a rise of pan-Arab sentiment throughout the Gulf through budding nationalist movements and the distribution of print materials from Iraq and Egypt, the region still retained strong economic, political, and even cultural ties to territories of the Indian Empire, which stretched from East Africa to Southeast Asia. As a region whose immense fossil fuel deposits had only recently been tapped, British officials scrambled to gather intelligence on what sort of content would attract listeners throughout the Gulf, and serve as counter propaganda to Italian broadcasts in Arabic. Relaying broadcast content through Egypt, including religious sermons, news bulletins, and music, was seemingly taken as a default strategy. However, informants and committees in the Gulf advising British authorities on the broadcasts, while enthusiastic about Egyptian pan-Arab sentiment, also noted that the BBC broadcasts should account for the local concerns and tastes of Khaliji listeners. This included announcing exchange rates for the Rupee, price rates on vital Indian imports, and also broadcasting music featuring local talent from both the Gulf and South Arabia (Aden). While some colonial officials viewed the BBC’s Arabic broadcasts in the Gulf as falling on the ears of members of a timeless, isolated desert culture, they soon realized that they not only had to account for a significant population of radio users, but also an existent local economy of selling sounds: a recording industry. Like the region’s economic and political connections extending from Middle Eastern territories to the far reaches of the Indian Empire, Gulf record industry also followed similar economic and cultural networks, its main centers of production being Baghdad, Aden, and Bombay by the late 1930s. Thus, while the Western reaches of British India were increasingly brought into the sonic fold of a “Middle Eastern” Arab world centered around Egypt, concessions had to be made to provincial circumstances, networks, and musical tastes in order to do so.