osu | tl

You may have noticed the strange combination of marching band music and lots of other random upbeat music, a considerable amount of which is Japanese. This is because OSU is not just the abbreviation of Ohio State University, whose marching band is one of the largest pep bands in the world and one of the most acclaimed college marching bands in the United States, but also a popular rhythm game called osu!, which has amassed about 20 million monthly users, not including people playing the game while not signed in. A dedicated portion of osu! players create beatmaps for songs they enjoy, which other players download. This has allowed lots of relatively unknown artists to gain followers and become famous because of osu! This notably includes modern j-core producers like Kobaryo, Laur, Camellia, XI, and t+pazolite, as well as older j-core from Japanese rhythm games like Sound Voltex. Likely due to the influence from Japanese rhythm games many early osu! players had, despite being an American game, the music of osu! is associated with anime, j-pop, j-core, visual novels, video game music, doujin music (especially that which is related to Touhou), Vocaloid, death metal that is energetic and not as disturbing, and lots of other random music that has been added by its millions of players. osu! has a list of featured artists who have cemented their status as osu! musicians, which is shown here. But due to the lack of capitalization on Last.fm tags, we will never know if this tag refers to Ohio State University or osu!. Use it however you want to. .