The Beatles performed for fifty-two BBC Radio programmes, beginning with an appearance on the series Teenager's Turn—Here We Go, recorded on 7 March 1962, and ending with the special The Beatles Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride, recorded on 26 May 1965; in total, 275 performances of 88 different songs were broadcast. Early bootlegs of some of the performances were based on low-quality home recordings of the broadcasts from the radio. It was not the BBC's practice to archive either the session tapes or the shows' master tapes, but many good quality distribution copies were found in various BBC departments during research for BBC radio specials produced in the 1980s.

Increasingly comprehensive collections of the BBC performances were bootlegged in the 1980s and early 1990s. The most notable of these was The Complete BBC Sessions, a nine-CD box set released in 1993 by Great Dane in Italy, where copyright protection for the broadcasts had expired.