Abstract

This article examines what happened in music as an economic activity in a period of its extraordinary transformation well studied by musicologists. It considers music as an industry that produced both goods and services at a time when investment in the industry rose very considerably with the increasing number of church choirs, the enlargement and refinement of court musical establishments and, above all, the growing number of amateurs. The analysis attempts to show that the growth and development of this industry manifested itself in a way that perhaps for the first time in Europe anticipates the modern creative economy.