"But have always read that when a producer for a star is sorting through hundreds of songs for ones that he/she will stake his/her's and his/her's client careers on.... that producer is unlikely to spend any time dressing a song up in their own mind. They want to hear what it will sound like then and there. The underlying assumption appears to be that if you cant deliver a good sounding song, then you aren't good."

This is quite true. The fact is now that we all listen to "snippets" of songs instead of listening to a full song. Anyone that has an ""Echo Dot" will say "Alexia, play..." and only play a piece of a song and then someone else goes to another song. So it is partially our distracted overworked brains, that give us the "8 second attention spans" that we all have now.

When a producer is going through hundreds of songs, usually those are written by the artist, are involved through their own publishing company catalogs or in some cases, the producers themselves are writers and their own songs get priority first. That can easily bring in several hundreds of even thousands of songs, from people they have personal relationships with. So going outside to look for songs is something that almost never happens.

Having said that there are many occasions that songs have come to artists/producers/labels from very indirect sources, someone hearing it and sending a link to someone else who passes it on. Friend of a friend of a friend, sort of thing. For that reason we should all keep in mind in anything that we put "out there" should have the best presentation we can, as you never know where it is going to end up.

My comments to Neil here, came as a suggestion to a friend, as we have known each other and actually written and recorded some songs before. Any time I worked with him, I did my best to get him a working representation of the songs we did that he could play in front of anyone. If he is doing more involved recordings, which I took this to be since it had some music tracks to it, I suggested making sure the voice was up to par for his song. I have not listened to his other songs, was just drawn to this thread when I saw his name.

But I would always suggest when you are trying to get something "out there", take away every reason that someone might turn it off. And the quality of a recording is a big reason people will turn something off now.