M USIC printing and publishing were notably underdeveloped in 18th-century Madrid com- pared with other similar European cities—at least, that is the received historiographical view. What might have brought about this situation is unclear, but one explanation that has traditionally been offered for the lack of a flourishing music publishing business is, quite simply, lack of demand. It must be said that this view very neatly reflects the historio- graphical tradition of 18th-century Spanish music, which, in the case of Madrid, has been dominated by the study of the court and other royal institutions to the detriment of the then newly emerging impor- tance for music-making of urban spaces, public and audiences. 1 As I shall show here, one major source of information for the changing status and practice of music in Madrid society in the second half of the 18th century—namely contemporary advertise- ments published in the local newspapers—reveals that an enormous quantity of music composed in Spain and elsewhere in Europe was on sale in the various music shops of the city. In this respect, the Gaceta de Madrid (GM hereafter) and the Diario de Madrid (DM) are particularly useful. 2 Apart from offering a considerably richer picture than has tac- itly been assumed until now, these newspapers prove that, had a continuous demand not existed, the musical market and music-selling as a commer- cial undertaking would have collapsed. Therefore, it seems that a barely competitive publishing system, rather than absence of demand, may account for the underdevelopment of music printing in Spain during this period. Music-sellers and their European connections The precise number of music-sellers active in Madrid in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is uncertain. A provisional estimate based on data provided by newspapers suggests that there were at least 61 bookshops where material of any kind related to music could be purchased, most of them established in the 1780s and 1790s in clearly defined areas. By way of comparison, 44 specific music-sell- ers were listed in Paris in 1780, and 66 in 1800. 3 However, the apparently respectable figure for Madrid must be treated with considerable caution, since it is not clear how many were actually general booksellers or how long the various shops lasted. In fact, it is obvious that music represented a very small proportion of the stock in some establishments, as occurred with bookshops that only offered a hand- ful of music histories or treatises. This was appar- ently the case, for instance, with those owned by Matías Escamilla, Gerónimo Solano, Alfonso López, Ramón García, Luis María Mateo, as well as the shop called Almudena (nos.19, 21, 33, 44, 51, 45 in illus.1). On the other hand, for others the selling of music scores stood at the core of their commercial enterprise: even where they seem not to have con- centrated exclusively on musical material, as in the case of Antonio del Castillo, Antonio Sancha and Miguel Copin (nos.14, 22 and 50), they must be regarded as true music-sellers. 4 Finally, other retail- ers or musicians acting as private sellers, whose enterprise mainly focused on a very reduced circle of buyers, certainly prospered without advertising themselves in the newspapers, and so remain little documented. To locate all these shops (regardless of the num- ber of advertisements) on a contemporary map of Madrid is not straightforward, as some changed their names as they passed into new hands or moved from one place to another. Illus.1 attempts to draw a preliminary map of the music-selling activity in late Miguel-Ángel Marín Music-selling in Boccherini’s Madrid 165 Early Music, Vol. , No. © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/em/cah064, available online at www.em.oupjournals.org