Context

In the last few years, there has been a surge of commissioned tracks specifically made to be used for osu! beatmapsets. This includes but is not limited to exclusive Featured Artist releases, official tournament commissioned works, and even community ran Mapping tournaments. A full list of tracks can be found in here.

ppy/osu-wiki@5762eb8 By the end of 2022, there have been active efforts by wiki maintainers and The Team™ to update this listing. But I believe that only mentioning the tracks in a separate wiki article is not giving the proper credit that these tracks should have. It feels disjointed with the ecosystem at large. They should be given a far better spotlight being content made by the game for the game. And the current best approach would be a more integrated system in the Beatmap Listing to highlight this kind of content a la Featured Artist.

Proposal

This proposal wants to start discussion for a potential three-pronged approach to this problem:

osu!web - [Beatmap Listing]

• New osu! original label: Exactly the same as existing labels like Explicit, Spotlight, and Featured Artist. These would quickly highlight those beatmapsets that are using this content. Eye candy that might also catch player's attention! I'll get to this later, but this label should not be a replacement to the current Featured Artist label depending on the definition given to this new category.
• New osu! originals filter: Exactly the same as the Featured Artist implementation. Quick button to quickly sort all beatmapsets using this content.

osu!wiki - [Ranked Criteria]

• New osu!original obligatory tag: I'm suggesting this to ensure that Ranked osu! original content is still searchable in Stable. I'm aware that efforts are being made to better implement these categories in lazer. That is currently outside the scope of this proposal. For now, this tag would ensure searchability both in the web and in legacy clients.

The three proposals are heavily based on how Featured Artist content has already been implemented. Assume that the implementation of the solutions would follow the same approach.

Pre-Requisite

Notice that in the proposal there was no mention of Licensed content. There's an ongoing discussion on what constitutes an original track prior to this issue being opened. We need to formalize what exactly means to be osu! original.

• Discussion: What is an osu! original track? osu-wiki#8807

Input from active members involved with track licensing, commissions, mapper's from the sets, or anyone heavily involved with community commissioned/generated content in the scope of this proposal is heavily appreciated and needed!