Music publishing is the business of creating, producing and distributing printed musical scores, parts, and books in various types of music notation, while ensuring that the composer, songwriter and other creators receive credit and royalties or other payment (where applicable). This article outlines the early history of the industry.

Music publishing did not begin on a large scale until the mid-15th century, when mechanical techniques for printing music were first developed. The earliest example, the Mainz Psalter, dates from 1457, and is the second book to be printed on the Gutenberg press (after the Gutenberg Bible). Prior to 1501, music books were owned by the wealthy or religious institutions, and music had to be learned by ear or copied out by hand. This was a very labor-intensive and time-consuming process, so it was first undertaken only by monks and priests seeking to preserve sacred music for the church. The few collections of secular music that are extant were commissioned and owned by wealthy noblemen. Examples include the Squarcialupi Codex of Italian Trecento music and the Chantilly Codex of French Ars subtilior music. Hand copying persisted long after the invention of printing and music was widely disseminated in manuscript form well into the 18th century, both in personal copying and scribal publication.

The father of modern music printing was Ottaviano Petrucci, a printer and publisher who was able to secure a twenty-year monopoly on printed music in Venice during the 16th century. His first collection was entitled Harmonice Musices Odhecaton and contained 96 polyphonic compositions, mostly by Josquin des Prez and Heinrich Isaac. He flourished by focusing on Flemish works, rather than Italian, as they were very popular throughout Europe during the Renaissance. His printing shop used the triple-impression method, in which a sheet of paper was pressed three times. The first impression was the staff lines, the second the words, and the third the notes. This method produced very clean results, though it was time-consuming and expensive.

Around 1520 in England, John Rastell developed a single-impression method for printing music. With his method, the staff lines, words and notes were all part of a single piece of type, making it much easier to produce. However, this method produced messier results, as the staff lines were often inexactly aligned and looked wavy on the page. The single-impression method eventually triumphed over Petrucci's and became the dominant mode of printing until copper-plate engraving took over in the 17th century. This method was adopted and used widely by a Frenchman, Pierre Attaingnant.

The concept of musical copyright had its beginnings in the reign of King Henry VIII of England who required copies of all printed matter to be sent to him and offered protection to printers in the form of licenses, primarily to produce a new source of revenue. In 1575 Elizabeth I granted Thomas Tallis and his pupil William Byrd a 21-year patent monopoly on the printing and publishing of polyphonic music. In 1618 German composer Heinrich Schütz submitted a petition to Johann Georg I to secure an electoral printing patent, for a period of ten years. Similar petitions were made in 1627 and 1636 (approval of the latter is preserved in documentation by Emperor Ferdinand III, 1637), and a request for renewal in 1642. The first modern copyright law was the Statute of Anne (1709), which protected all published works for a period of fourteen years, later extended to twenty-eight years. The earliest attempt at a printed musical copyright notice appears in the "Shir Hashirim" of Salomone Rossi (Venice, 1623) which includes a rabbinical curse on those infringing the text, written by Leon of Modena.

The first international agreement involving copyright was the Berne Convention of 1886. The core principle of the convention is its provision that each of the contracting countries shall provide automatic protection for works in all other countries of the union and for unpublished works whose authors are citizens of or residents in those countries. Performance rights are included in these provisions. As of March 2012, 165 countries had become parties to the convention.

The first U.S. federal copyright law gave protections to "maps, charts, and books." Contrary to some scholarly accounts, the 1790 Act's protection of "books" did encompass musical compositions. The first registration in the U.S. for a musical composition was made on January 6, 1794, by Raynor Taylor for the original song "The Kentucky Volunteer." However, musical compositions were not explicitly protected until the Copyright Act of 1831, and then protection remained limited to reproduction rights. The copyright term was twenty-eight years plus a fourteen-year renewal period.

While England was a leader in the development of copyright, the French led the way in performing rights. In 1777, Pierre de Beaumarchais founded the "Bureau de Legislation Dramatique" which became the present Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD) in 1829. Many years later, in 1847, this inspired the composer and librettist Ernest Bourget to claim payment for each performance of his works at the Café des Ambassadeurs, a leading Café-concert venue of that time. A lawsuit won by Bourget and others in 1851 led to the formation of the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM) – the first performing rights society in the world.