ABSTRACT
Theatre, poetry, novels, operettas, songs and orchestras found new audiences with the introduction of the radio to the Middle East. The fi rst radio broadcast in the Arab world was heard in the 1920s, but the audiences were very small. In the late 1940s, governments realized the benefi t of having their own broadcasting agencies and the number of receivers per capita soared. Almost twenty million Arab households had radios by 1975, and numbers have been increasing since then.
