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songs. Those songs could then be marketed with the singers' endorsements- theywere called "royalty ballads." It was a practice of which the industry was never very proud, and there were periodic attempts to change it, but they never succeeded because of fears that competing companies would take advantage of any that observed a moratorium. It explains why a leading proponent of musical copyright could tell MPs that he roundly denounced the paying of royalties.

The publishing companies were family firms, proud of their cultural mission. Not just concerned to exploit commercially the value of "dots," as the printed notes were called, they saw themselves as nurturing personal as well as professional relationships with artists like Stanford and Elgar. They sold sheet music at about a shilling and fourpence for each song. The details ofhow that pricing was calculated were kept confidential, however, and this encouraged rumors that the publishers colluded with each other to keep prices high. A pirate could get you the same song for twopence.2

Whether or not they were aware of this, the Edwardian pirates built on practices that had been pursued for centuries. The illicit reproduction of musical scores had existed since at least the seventeenth century, and probably earlier. But it had never been a systemicproblem before, because the enterprise of music publishing had not centered on a property principle. Until the 1110s music was regarded in England as lying beyond the purview of statutory copyright, so piracy as such did not exist. Publishers simply issued unauthorized reprints freely. They also arranged, transposed, and otherwise altered works for paying clienteles, sometimes in periodical form, as in Harrison and Drury's MusicalMagazine of the 178os.3 Meanwhile opera companies in the London of Handel and Arne thought nothing of sending agents to each others' opening nights, transcribing striking melodies, and reusing them in their own dramas. There was no great sense of impropriety attached to this until later, when Romantic ideas of authorial genius became commonplace and a composer like Hector Berlioz could lambaste amenders as thieves, libelers, and assassins. Yet Berlioz also reported that the arts of appropriation were still alive and well in the nineteenth century: he recounted meeting a rascal named Marescot who crowed about the fortune he had made by applying them to Weber's Der Freischutz. (So brazen was his act, Berlioz added, that "I feel pretty sure that you will take me for a historian and hence not believe me.")4

Almost every moderately successful composer knew the exasperation this kind of thing could lead to, not least at the hands of the omnipresent - and by all accounts extremely irritating- organ-grinders who filled city streets with deformed versions of melodies like the toreador song from Carmen.5 Any fan of Gilbert and Sullivan knows of the furious, convoluted, and sometimes ludicrous struggles they pursued in Britain, America, and elsewhere over publishing and performing rights. Their early Thespis was already garnished with a printed "Caution to the American Pirates," and they once shipped an entire company of players to America under assumed names to forestall a rival impresario. The Pirates ofPenzance was composed in a blurred rush of all-nighters (culminating in an interpolation of music from Thespis) to stymie pirates in New York.6 All this was simply the nature of musical life. What were unprecedented in the years around i9oo were the size and audience of the pirate boom. And in that context the fact that music only existed, in a sense, in performance complicated its plight beyond anything familiar from books and images.

Two profound changes underlay the extraordinary growth in music piracy, one technological in character and related to production, the other cultural and related to use. The first was the development of photolithography. This process allowed pirates for the first time to make what were to all intents and purposes exact copies. Some piracies took an expert to tell them from the