Needle time disappeared long before needles did- when did you last change the needle in your iPod, by the way?
That was the limit on the amount of recorded music broadcast during the day. It was the reason for current chart hits being performed on the lunchtime show, by Vince Hill and the Northern Dance Orchestra during the early Sixties.
What the BBC do pay is royalties, which is paid per minute of broadcast. They have to keep records of every track played, and these are used to distribute the royalties to the copyright owners.
This is mosly done automatically by means of the encoded song information on a CD (or MP3) these days.
A label has to be very small indeed- or hoplessly naiive- to make a record without this information. It is probably more trouble that it is worth to play home produced and home copied tracks that do not have the codes- on the one occasion I have done it, I had to sign a release form renouncing any right to royalties for that track.
The accountancy would have been disproportionately large to pay royalties to an individual.
If the track had been allocated a code number, we could have earned nearly a pound!
Cheers
Dave