One evening last week, having woken up earlier and, as usual, turned on the Jeremy Vine show (with guest host), I turned, again, to BBC Sounds to find… nothing. They’ve been threatening to turn it off for non-UK listeners for months, pretty much without explanation, and telling users that there is an exciting new and utterly inferior service in which you can just stream Radio 4 and the World Service live. I texted my friend to say it had finally happened, and she said “I know. I immediately deleted the app in anger. Rude”. In fact, it turns out that Radio 2 is available to stream, but this not communicated, let’s say, clearly.
Now to be clear: neither she nor I believe we are entitled to listen for free to radio funded by the UK taxpayer. Being able to listen to pretty much everything whenever I want to has been a huge benefit, for which I would pay a quite large subscription – I’d welcome the ability to do that. But: why have they chosen to withdraw the service rather than to introduce a subscription model? And, for that matter, why don’t they explain why they have withdrawn it and that streaming is still available?
The second question turns out to have an answer. I’ll include a long quote from James Cridland explaining this in detail below the fold. But here’s the short version: the reason they are turning it off is that they are afraid of having to pay worldwide music rights, and they are worried that explaining what they are doing will trigger them having to pay those rights in arrears. And because, in fact, they are continuing to stream the music stations they fear that telling people too clearly how to find them will count as marketing, and thus will trigger having to pay music rights for those streams.
But this leaves me with the first question. The music shows are great but they are essentially ephemeral — I wouldn’t pay a sub for them. By contrast the BBC has a massive archive of spoken word radio that, while intended to be ephemeral is in fact literature that will last forever. It broadcasts this archive on a station called Radio 4 Extra, and most of Radio 4 Extra is (in the UK — it used to be abroad as well) available on demand for a month or so afterwards. As Cridland explains, Radio 4 Extra will still be streamed, but with no catch up, and is not one of the two stations that the BBC makes available through its new (pretty terrible) app. That’s what I, and my friend, would pay our subscription for. And there can’t, surely, be rights issues for 95% of that produce – the BBC (in one of its two forms, see Cridland below) must have worldwide rights forever to obscure thrillers written by Francis Durbridge wannabes in August 1954, no? That output is not affected by the music rights problem (I assume), and could safely be put on catch up (Evidence: good news is that apparently catch up for Radio 4 will be re-introduced in a few weeks).
If anyone with insider knowledge can answer my first question please do, anonymously if necessary. And, any other comments welcome!
Here’s Cridland in full:
Although it doesn’t look like it, the BBC is really two different companies these days – the public service broadcaster for the UK, which is paid-for by the licence fee, and a commercial company tasked with earning revenue for the BBC everywhere else, called BBC Studios (formerly BBC Worldwide).
BBC Sounds was paid-for by the public service broadcaster and really only intended for the UK; but, more importantly, the music rights for radio stations like Radio 2 or Radio 6 Music were also only negotiated for the UK. It costs hundreds of pounds in music rights to play a single record on Radio 2 – but that money only covers music rights in the UK, and not overseas.The generally accepted rules for music radio’s payment of international music rights are that if your radio station a) is not marketed in a country other than yours, and b) you don’t earn revenue from that country, then you aren’t liable for additional music rights in that country. On the South Coast of England, you can often get radio stations from France – but because they’re not marketed to UK listeners, nor earning money from them, they have no music fees to pay for the UK.
In 2017, TuneIn lost a landmark court ruling, and lost again in the Court of Appeal in 2021. That clarified the law that since TuneIn was marketing radio stations to a new country, and earning money from them, they were liable for music rights payments in that country.
This is clearly something that BBC Studios doesn’t want. Paying for music rights worldwide is prohibitively expensive; and also there’s no guarantee that the terms would be the same, thus causing issues for the domestic broadcasts. (As one example – US music licensing contracts require that you can’t broadcast more than four tracks from the same artist in a three hour period. There’s no such rule in the UK.) That contract also requires accurate reports, both of songs played but also exact listener numbers – something which could add significant work.
It’s easier for BBC Studios to give access to BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service (two stations they own effectively all the rights for), where they are free to monetise these by using ad banners, audio advertising and even subscription.
Why aren’t they communicating all this?
A few reasons – first, perhaps one of legal liability (they probably don’t want 25 years of music rights payments), and also because if they do communicate too clearly how to find BBC domestic music radio, then they could be claimed as marketing those stations, and therefore have to pay the music rights fees.
The BBC is, in short, delicately tiptoeing through this issue. It would be easy for them to turn off BBC music radio entirely overseas. It’s lucky for us that they aren’t doing that.
{ 43 comments }
NomadUK 08.10.25 at 3:23 pm
As an expatriate UK citizen, I’ve always wanted to be able to simply post my licence fee from afar in exchange for BBC content, but am happy enough that I can get to BBC Radio and podcasts for nothing. The loss of Sounds is unfortunate, but following the links in their FAQ gets me to streams for all the radio channels, and especially Radio 3, and I can manage that just fine; it’s what I had to do before Sounds came along, anyway. Bookmarks!
George 08.10.25 at 6:41 pm
So it seems while thousands of Britain’s are embracing VPNs to escape the clutches of the Online Safety Act you need a VPN with an exit node in Britain. Looks like there’s a deal to be done.
Michael Furlan 08.10.25 at 9:07 pm
Radio France streams a lot of music on their app. I wonder if they will have to pull that down too.
Harry 08.10.25 at 9:45 pm
My impression is that as long as you i) don’t market your station abroad and ii) don’t make any money from the abroad broadcasting/streaming there is no problem. The BBC does want to make money (with ads and maybe subs — it has introduced a subscription for early access to podcasts I just noticed) and ALSO lives in fear that it might be considered to be marketing the service if it clearly tells people how to access it.
Harry 08.10.25 at 9:55 pm
There’s mixed evidence about the effectiveness of vpns. My understanding is that the BBC is quite good at detecting that you are using one. But — having, say, 50k people subscribe to vpns rather than just pay subs to the BBC seems crazy to me.
engels 08.10.25 at 10:33 pm
At some point BBC, like the Guardian, will realise USA is where the money and power are and start aiming everything at US audiences anyway. The news channel already seems to have gone that way in the evenings (they’ve actually moved the studio to Washington I think).
Name {Redacted} 08.11.25 at 12:43 am
I wonder every morning now when I awake that this will be the day BBC Sounds finally disappears from my iPhone. I had fully expected to lose the service in mid-July based upon information I received from the app. We are now well into August and I am still able to listen to my usual programming on Radio 4 and BBC Radio Foyle (married to a Derry Girl) as well as podcasts, audio books, etc. Like the OP, I would be happy to pay for a subscription service but have no idea how to go about obtaining one. In the meantime I have nightmares of those apocryphal BBC license detector vans suddenly showing up in my suburban Washington, DC neighborhood.
As it happens, we were in London visiting our daughter and her family on the day in July BBC Sounds had informed me service in the States was ending. Nothing happened and I have carried on with my listening without interruption. Now almost three weeks later that is still the case. My wife tells me menacingly every morning, “They will track you down eventually,” but I am convinced that my iPhone somehow managed to “mirror” my daughter’s BBC license during the two weeks we were at her house in London. Far-fetched, absolutely. Magic, perhaps. But I am not inclined at this point to bring my current good fortune to the BBC’s attention.
Harry 08.11.25 at 2:58 am
Name: I have bad news I’m afraid. It seems to give you a month of grace after leaving the UK (hence different people losing the app on different days). I’d say you have about a week left…
MisterMr 08.11.25 at 7:51 am
“the BBC (in one of its two forms, see Cridland below) must have worldwide rights forever to obscure thrillers written by Francis Durbridge wannabes in August 1954, no?”
I think that this depends on the terms of contract they had with the FD wannabes, and maybe in the past they didn’t worry about worldwide audience, and maybe they don’t still have the contracts in a way that is simple to check, so they won’t take risks.
I think that here in Italy the default for copyright contracts is that they apply only in Italy if not stated otherwise (because I’ve seen one years ago that specified that rights were worldwide, but it was a book).
engels 08.11.25 at 11:17 am
neither she nor I believe we are entitled to listen for free to radio funded by the UK taxpayer
As a British taxpayer, I say fill your boots (alternatively, I think Novaramedia works in US).
https://novaramedia.com/
engels 08.16.25 at 10:19 am
In fact I’d happily pay a bit more tax to move Jeremy Vine to CNN or Fox.
https://caat.org.uk/news/2015-02-05-2/
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/broadcasters-silence-over-rabblerouser-tweet-on-disability-benefits/
engels 08.16.25 at 1:03 pm
This seems relevant to the “disclosure” discussion:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1121223/Why-I-won-8217-t-discuss-Christianity-air-Radio-2-Panorama-host-Jeremy-Vine.html
Intrigued to know exactly what are JV’s unsayable views that believing in God goes “along with” (full disclosure: I’ve never listened to the Jeremy Vine Show.)
Harry 08.16.25 at 1:57 pm
I’m a regular Jeremy Vine listener, and the only way I’ve got real hints of what his political views are are the reverence, warmth, and adoration in his voice when he used to interview Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner. He really really loved Tony Benn and didn’t care who knew it.
Harry 08.16.25 at 1:58 pm
Possibly: Benn was also a Christian of the kind I suspect Vine is, but that doesn’t explain Skinner.
Harry 08.16.25 at 2:03 pm
Here’s one of the views he (rightly) thinks are unspeakable on his show:
“You can’t go on the air and say: “I think there should be cycle routes in half of London” (even though I do), because it would just wind up motorists. In the same way if I go on and say: “I think Jesus Christ is alive today”, it’ll just wind up all the atheists. So I have to slightly take my cards off the table.”
engels 08.16.25 at 2:26 pm
It’s hard to imagine Tony Benn speaking at an ADS dinner but I’ll take your word for it. As I might have mentioned elsewhere I generally try to ignore the BBC as much as possible (with exceptions for R3 and Soweto Kinch’s jazz show) but I have no problem with free-loading foreigners or expats so I hope they find a way to fob off the lawyers.
TM 08.16.25 at 4:49 pm
I don’t know this person and this show but if he’s a journalist, then yes, it’s trivially true you don’t state your opinions on contentious issues in your role as journalist. You should however be able and willing to say that you support democracy and human rights and equality and oppose racism and sexism, because journalists and media outlets should support these values and a public proadcaster in particular should be committed these values as a matter of principle. I don’t know about the BBC but for example German public broadcasters are by law bound to support the constitution, which implies a commitment to democracy, human rights and equality etc.
I’m mentioning this because this is exactly what our media (I observe this in particular in Germany and the US) increasingly fail to do. They claim that political neutrality requires them to treat racism, authoritarianism and so on as normal political opinions that have to be respected and journalists are prohibited from taking sides for democracy and equality, otherwise they will be seen as biased. I don’t have a good explanation for this. Most mass media are nowadays controlled by right wing and often openly fascist oligarchs and it’s no surprise that these media are normalizing and supporting fascism, but why public broadcasters are also doing this I don’t fully understand.
engels 08.17.25 at 10:56 am
Other tings they don’t say on air: all three panellists (in this debate about whether the UK should build concentration camps for migrants) are Christians and all three went to private schools, practically (Monty’s state-run military personnel school in Germany being the slight exception).
engels 08.17.25 at 11:32 am
why public broadcasters are also doing this I don’t fully understand
Because to the establishment fascism is preferable to socialism.
engels 08.17.25 at 12:25 pm
opinions on contentious issues
Eg: once people are dead, they stay dead and don’t come back.
engels 08.17.25 at 12:51 pm
German public broadcasters are by law bound to support the constitution, which implies a commitment to democracy, human rights and equality etc
And Israel presumably.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-stands-by-israel-as-its-reason-of-state-with-caveats/a-68918777
Harry 08.17.25 at 2:33 pm
Given his job, I’d wouldn’t be at all surprised if Benn attended an ADS dinner or equivalent, but am sure he wouldn’t have been paid for it.
Of course they don’t tell you those people went to private schools or are Christian (though in case of TM the Christian bit seems a stretch). Who is the presenter? (not JV, obviously, and on wiki all his normal stand-ins seem to be women).
What a dreadful piece of television that is, though. As I say, I listen the JV’s morning radio 2 show, on which he is extremely skilled, and if anything seems to have a slight left-of-center tilt except when interviewing particular left wing grandees, by whom he seems rather awed (so the tilt seems less slight).
engels 08.17.25 at 6:02 pm
Whoops; clearly I don’t know Jerry Vinger from Adam (or Enosh)—I bear him no special ill will—but Tory Tim is a lifelong God botherer, anti-abortionist and one-time anti-sodomist.
TM 08.18.25 at 7:48 am
engels 20. Personally I care less about a journalist’s religious views than about whether they are doing their journalist job well.
“to the establishment fascism is preferable to socialism” This is all too obvious except that socialism isn’t in any shape or form on the menu anyway. What I still find hard to understand is why they prefer fascism to bourgeois democracy.
MisterMr 08.18.25 at 12:09 pm
@TM 24
I think many people have problems distinguishing “neutrality” from “bothsidedoism”, the same way most people have problem understanding that “freedom of religion” is mostly a limit on religious people (from forcing their beliefs on others), so for example if one says “the cross is a religious symbol and so shouldn’t be used in public schools” this is actually a pro-freedom-of-religion concept, but many misunderstand this and believe that freedom of religion is that of putting the cross in the classroom.
A lot of, let’s call them, enlightenment principles require a certain degree of abstraction of thought to understand them correctly, we instead are social beings who think emotionally in terms of friends and enemies, and therefore “neutrality” is taken as equidistance from the two sides, not as “attempt to be objective” (that has its own problem but is IMHO what you are pointing to).
engels 08.18.25 at 4:24 pm
TM, as I said, nothing against Vine particularly (too bad he’s doubly persecuted as both a Christian and a cyclist).
Tm 08.18.25 at 7:09 pm
And as I said, I don’t know Vine and have no opinion about him in particular.
engels 08.19.25 at 5:56 pm
socialism isn’t in any shape or form on the menu anyway
Not sure if this is meant to be a No True Socialist argument but Corbyn’s and Sultana’s party has had over 800 000 supporters sign up and Mamdani is the Democratic candidate for NYC mayor.
Tm 08.20.25 at 7:08 am
engels 28: Maybe Mamdani is a socialist (from what I know he’s probably a bogstandard Social Democrat but then I’m old enough to remember that the fascists attacked Kamala Harris as a Marxist Communist and nobody thought it was a parody), but he won’t have the power to make a socialist revolution. If the oligarchs are seriously afraid of being expropriated by people like Corbyn or Mamdani (or Harris or Biden), they are even more delusional than I give them credit for.
100 years ago, capitalists had reason to be afraid of Communism. Now they don’t but they are exactly as eager to support fascism as they were around 1930, which means we need to revisit our theories of fascism.
MisterMr 08.20.25 at 9:53 am
@TM 29
Most “communists” are also social democrats in reality; the problem is that “social democracy” already requires quite big redistribuition of wealth, that is a problem for the right.
Furthermore, there is the problem that in the west economic growth is likely going to be lacklustre for some decades, which sharpens social conflict.
Finally, since in reality nobody really has a clear solution for the economic problems, the political battle is shifted on the cultural ones, where in addition the right can win though appeal to lower income, lower education cultural conservatives; switching the conflict from “money” to “values” is always going to lead to extremes because one can perhaps find a middle solution on money, but not on values.
I will add that “fascism” rose in Italy and Germany in a situation of economic failure of capitalism, so it is not just an extremist form of capitalism but more like a failure mode of capitalism.
Tm 08.20.25 at 7:34 pm
30: “the right can win though appeal to lower income, lower education cultural conservatives”
There is no inherent reason why lower income lower education people should be culturally conservative. You are positing a correlation, not a causal analysis.
Of that correlation I’m skeptical. I’ll never tire of pointing out that the main leaders and supporters of today’s fascist movements are neither low income nor low education and that the support for fascism among cultural elites (including much of the media) receives amazingly little attention in these debates. In the 1980s it may have been true that fascism was a cry for attention of uneducated socially marginalized skinheads. Nowadays we have mainstreamed fascist parties winning or coming close to winning elections and enthusiastically celebrated by crowds of suit-wearing economic elite types.
““fascism” rose in Italy and Germany in a situation of economic failure of capitalism”
Yes and today we are not remotely in a comparable situation. So?
Tm 08.20.25 at 8:23 pm
A clarification. While there are in fact plenty of educated fascists, there is a clear correlation between education and voting behavior, especially in the US two party system. There is much less correlation with income. In the US practically none. The likeliest explanation in my view is that education conveys a bit of resistance against manipulation. But manipulation doesn’t happen all by itself. What explains most of the electoral success of fascist parties is the fact that the manipulation machines controlled by the capitalist oligarchs, which only a few years ago mainly supported moderate right wing parties and politicians, have turned their fire power towards supporting fascists.
And my question is still, why. What happened in just the last 15 or so years that convinced a large fraction of the capitalist class that fascist mob rule is preferable to the system of liberal democracy and rule of law that they – the capitalists – benefited greatly from over the last 80 years.
J-D 08.21.25 at 4:22 am
None? Are you sure about that? I’d like some hard data.
MisterMr 08.21.25 at 1:35 pm
@TM 31 and 32
“Yes and today we are not remotely in a comparable situation [failure of capitalism]. So?”
We totally are. Interest rates are super low (that’s whence most of profits come from), the economy looks like a gambling game where you have to bet on finance, there are no good investiment prospects, China seems positioned to eat an ever growing share of the pie.
It is true that capitalists are still raking profits on older investiments, but they also need to make new investiments, and there the crisis is quite evident.
(this situation didn’t start today, but up to 2008 it was hidden by the fact that central banks could progressively cut interest rates and thus increase total level of finance/credit).
“there is a clear correlation between education and voting behavior, especially in the US two party system. There is much less correlation with income.”
AFAIK there is strong correlation in income, and more with wealth, but only after you disaggregate from education. Because education correlates with income, the correlation with education (in voting democrat) hides the correlation with wealth (in voting republican), but both exist.
This is a paper from 2021 about the disallineation of the income axis VS education axis by Picketty.
“What explains most of the electoral success of fascist parties is the fact that the manipulation machines controlled by the capitalist oligarchs, which only a few years ago mainly supported moderate right wing parties and politicians, have turned their fire power towards supporting fascists.”
The causality runs the other way: right wing party went fascist because this is where poor, but disaffected from the left for cultural reasons, voters are, so the right went there.
This is a very big problem, because the left can’t just stop to be green or pro immigrant or pro gay, and even if it could it would be morally bad. But this is the problem we are facing, not just the capitalists becoming more fascist for unknown reasons.
MisterMr 08.21.25 at 2:00 pm
From the paper I referenced above, pp. 16-17, my italics:
[…] highest-educated voters were less likely to vote for social democratic parties than were lowest-educated voters by 15 percentage points in the 1960s. This gap has shifted very gradually from being negative to becoming positive, from ?10 in the 1970s to ?5 in the 1980s, 0 in the 1990s, +5 in the 2000s, and finally +10 in 2016–2020.
[…]
The evolution has been dramatically different in the case of income. The bottom line shows that top-income voters have always been less likely to vote for social democratic and affiliated parties than low-income voters. This gap has decreased from ?15 in the 1960s to about ?10 in the past decade, but it remains negative.
[…]
Note that the two indicators in the figure control for all available variables at the micro level (education/income, age, gender, religion, church attendance, rural/urban location, region, race/ethnicity, employment status, and marital status). The evolution of these indicators without controls displays a larger decline in the influence of income on the vote, from nearly ?20 in the 1960s to about ?5 in 2016–2020. The main reason is that higher-educated voters have on average higher incomes, so the reversal of the educational divide has mechanically led to a reduction in the difference between top-income and low-income voters.
Tm 08.21.25 at 2:15 pm
J-D: The best data we have are exit polls and they are very limited. I would take them with a grain of salt due to the difficulty of getting reliable (self-reported income!) and representative data. But what we have supports my claim that there is little correlation between voting and income. The biggest predictors of voting are race, religion, education, gender, age, urbanity. Regarding Income, they say the lowest income bracket (<30k) and the highest (>200k) both supproted Harris but by small margins of 4 resp. 6 points. The 30k-100k groups supported Trump by 6 points. Whether these margins are statistically significant in any rigorous sense I doubt. Anyway they are ridiculously close to even. It’s very clear that cultural factors play a much bigger role than economic factors. Which is absurd given that the economic difference between Republican vs Democratic policies is bigger than it has been in a long time but this is the world we live in.
The exit polls tell us nothing about high income groups and nothing about economic situation (home ownership, business ownership and so on). I suspect that these are stronger predictors than merely income.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
engels 08.21.25 at 3:03 pm
…As recently as 2012 Republicans remained the leading party of affluent Americans—not just Super pac megadonors, but the broad swathe of voters earning over $100,000 a year who favoured Bush and Romney by consistent double-digit margins. This is no longer the case. In 2016 Clinton raised far more outside money than Trump, drew even among six-figure households, and surpassed him in wealthy suburbs from northern Virginia to southern California. By the 2018 midterms Democrats held seats in every one of the twenty richest congressional districts in the country. Two years later Biden won six-figure earners outright; this year, they were among the very few demographics that swung toward Harris. The Brahmin Left in the us today is not just highly educated but highly paid; and its influence within the country’s most powerful industries and institutions—hedge funds, ai firms, Big Pharma, the New York Times, the Ivy League—remains undiminished.footnote10
The American Merchant Right, on the other hand, depends principally not just on the less-educated but the lower-earning portion of the working class. The Democrats’ historic advantage with the bottom third of the income distribution—households earning less than $50,000 a year—has been in decline since 2012 (see figure 1). This year, as higher-income voters broke toward Harris, the lower-income group gave a small edge to Trump. Considering the income ladder as a whole, Republican gains were largest at the very bottom, diminishing with every upward rung: twelve points from voters making under $25,000, ten points from those making between $25,000 and $50,000, seven points from those making between $50,000 and $75,000, and five points from those making between $75,000 and $100,000.footnote11
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii150/articles/matthew-karp-trump-redux
Tm 08.21.25 at 5:16 pm
“The Brahmin Left in the us today is not just highly educated but highly paid; and its influence within the country’s most powerful industries and institutions—hedge funds, ai firms, Big Pharma, the New York Times, the Ivy League—remains undiminished”
Yeah, what a joke. The NYT has two left-of-center writers left among how many? While the NYT mainstream continues sucking up to Trump. And even a Krugman who is actually well-paid and who might count as “Brahmin” was forced out because Sulzberger doesn’t want to publish all that anti-Trump stuff any more.
“Hedge funds”, “Big Pharma”, I’m lost. Which hedge funds are run by leftists, under what definition of “left”? The tankie left is beyond parody. This kind of “class analysis” is beyond parody but in these Orwellian times, that goes without saying.
Tm 08.21.25 at 5:19 pm
MisterMr 34 claims we are in an economic situation comparable to post WWI and the Great Depression. You don’t expect me to respond to that ludicrous nonsense do you?
MisterMr 08.22.25 at 5:56 am
We had an economic crisis almost as big as the great depression in 2008 and we are more or less at the same levels of inequality as before WW1.
But we have not the same levels of unemployment like in the great depression (or even like before WW1).
So we are not in the same situation but there are big similarities, not with fascism proper but with the pre WW1 situation.
Tm 08.22.25 at 1:18 pm
MisterMr, you want me to take seriously the claim that a Social Democratic NYC Mayor Mamdani is a threat to capitalism comparable to the Weimar era KPD, and the current economic conditions are almost comparable to the Great Depression except that there was mass unemployment then and we are close to full employment – a minor detail I guess. Also there are similarities with the pre WW1 situation, do you mean pre WW1 or is that a typo? Because pre WW1 would be a whole other debate.
Sorry I don’t have patience for this.
Regarding 35, I don’t think your data are in conflict with my remarks at 36.
MisterMr 08.22.25 at 5:51 pm
I know nothing of Mamdani, and yes I mean pre WW1 not pre WW2.
Fascism proper is from the interwar period but before WW1 there was a lot of jingoism, nationalism etc., that is closer to current politics.
Also the USA was a big economic exporter, that had an effect on european powers comparable to that of China today, though smaller.
Also there was an increase in financial capitalismo and monopolyes.
It is true that those governments weren’t yet properly fascist, but relative to modern standards we would call them fascist today.
engels 08.22.25 at 10:05 pm
the claim that a Social Democratic NYC Mayor Mamdani is a threat to capitalism comparable to the Weimar era KPD
Who made this claim?
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