By 1501, Venice already ran on printing presses. Roughly a hundred and fifty of them worked the city, turning out more than four thousand editions between them, twice the output of Paris, its nearest rival. Aldus Manutius had already made the Aldine Press famous for small, elegant books scholars could carry in a pocket.
Music, though, had not caught up and any composer with a new mass or chanson still had to rely on a scribe and however many months it took to copy the piece out by hand, once for the choir that commissioned it and then again for anyone who wanted a copy of their own.
