Negotiating needletime: the Musicians’ Union, the BBC and the record companies, c. 1920–1990

Martin Cloonan

doi:10.1080/03071022.2016.1215098

Abstract

This article examines an important, but hitherto largely overlooked, licensing system which operated in the UK between the late 1920s and late 1980s and limited the amount of recorded music that broadcasters could use in radio progammes. Known as ‘needletime’ the system was formalized in the 1930s when the BBC reached a collective agreement with the UK’s record companies – here acting via the copyright licensing society Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) – about the amount of records that it could play. Drawing on previously unused materials, the article provides a revisionist account of the development of needletime, focusing on the actions of a third party, the Musicians’ Union (MU). As is shown, the MU was able to exercise influence on both camps and thus to have a profound impact on the development of music radio and the wider music industries in the UK. Previous accounts of needletime are critiqued and it is suggested that, while it was accused of operating ‘restrictive practices’, the MU’s role can be seen more as an attempt to ensure that the suitably remunerated employment of musicians was as widespread as possible. Needletime emerges as perhaps the key agreement thus far within the UK’s music industries’ industrial relations.

Highlights

This article examines an important, but hitherto largely overlooked, licensing system which operated in the UK between the late 1920s and late 1980s and limited the amount of recorded music that broadcasters could use in radio progammes
Between the late 1920s and the late 1980s a licensing system operated in the UK which limited the amount of recorded music that broadcasters could use in their programmes
The second was the record companies who owned copyright in the sound recordings and who were for many years concerned that over-use of recorded music on the radio would hit record sales

Summary

Introduction

Between the late 1920s and the late 1980s a licensing system operated in the UK which limited the amount of recorded music that broadcasters could use in their programmes. The overall aim is to fill a gap in the existing knowledge given that the extant academic literature on the needletime system is limited but generally oppositional to it It is most often found in books whose prime focus is broadcasting in general and on radio in particular. For example, there are various mentions in Asa Briggs’s history of broadcasting in the UK and in Stephen Barnard’s books on radio.3 Such accounts are a useful starting point, if not always entirely accurate.. Briggs talks of needletime as a ‘highly restrictive irksome’ system brought in to being by ‘a powerful coalition of rich record manufacturers and highly protectionist trade unionists’.5 In his overview of needletime Richard Witts condemns the MU’s General Secretary of 1948–1971, Hardie Ratcliffe, as a ‘dogmatic’ man with ‘Luddite gripes’ and says that not until the Broadcasting Act of 1990 was the BBC ‘liberated ... This includes the suggestion that, following its actions in appeasing its members in the BBC’s orchestras during the 1930s, ‘the MU’s moderating status privileged the union for decades’, no evidence is provided of that privilege. Witts claims that the union ‘opposed ... the synthesizer in the early 1980s’, when the History, 7, 3 (2012), 241–62, 251, 244. 7ibid., 245

Objectives

Conclusion