900 pseudonyms used by Italian and international songwriters and film music composers.

The MAPSEM (Mapping Printed Sources of Entertainment Music in Twentieth-Century Italy) project aims to map data from the printed editions for professional, entertainment, and everyday use that were prevalent in Italy from the early 20th century to the 1950s. These materials include thousands of monographs, scores for small orchestras, songs, and film adaptations that document an essential part of the musical life of the period. While curating the dataset, we discovered that many songwriters used pseudonyms when publishing and registering their work with copyright societies. It was therefore essential to trace these pseudonyms back to their real names. This was necessary to avoid attributing works to non-existent people, and to attribute to authors all works for which they were responsible, regardless of the pseudonym they used. This dataset contains tabular data of around 900 pseudonyms and aliases used by Italian and international songwriters, lyricists, composers, arrangers, and music publishers. (2025-10-10)