[Pseudo Enigma]

I agree. The only thing that kept me playing in the first place was so I could compete with Mike and Herogashix. If I didn't have that I probably wouldn't have stayed for so long and made friends (which is a common reason for most people to STAY in a community, even if the whole thing is going down hill)

When I started playing I had no idea what to do actually. I just played the same song over and over again because I knew that it would make me a better player. Again, without the goal of becoming a better player in order to compete with my brothers, I would've just dropped the game thinking it was too hard and pointless. Because face it, all you're doing is tapping the keyboard at a certain beat, and pressing a different key for each column, it gets old after about a hundred songs. The new players don't have that goal unless they were brought here.

Honestly, if I just came here, I would be confused where the hell to go to play. It's not exactly obvious. You have to go to the dropdown menus which isn't ever the first thing I look at when I get to a site. From there I would be confused as to what to play, since new people probably don't know what the song list is, or where to access it. Even that disc menu is confusing as hell, since when you go to select a song, you select your favourite genre, pick a random song, and then holy shit this is too hard. I seriously think that ring menu should be sorted by difficulty instead of genre, honestly. That way people would actually use it (I don't.) and the new people would know exactly which songs to play. After losing every last song I have played, I would from there be discouraged, quit and never play the game again. Which seems common. The easiest songs aren't at all appealing.

We have boring slow music from 1-6, which are the first songs you have to play in order to get good. I remember sitting there waiting for the next arrow feeling really bored listening to I think it was Trip to the Moon? Anyway, we need some good songs that are shit your pants easy. LOTS of them. Because if we can't hook people into the game by getting them to play the genres they like, as opposed to the genres they hate, we can get a headstart, since they will want to play the other songs.

If anything, that's what I see is the problem.
TL;DR: We need a LOT of 1-5 files that are interesting, and more in each genre. We also need to make it more obvious what to do and where to go to play.

edit: then again, I probably just reiterated the whole OP