But in this day and age do sites like Myspace and Facebook not make life much easier? Invite all your friends, they invite some random people and with a bit of luck you may end up with a hardcore following. If you're really good, people will know about you. You start by playing little local venues, maybe get the odd slightly bigger gig off of that. You're not telling me that every successful artist out there funded their own first recordings and album production so they could get themselves out there? You certainly don't need to mass produce your own CD album to let people hear what you can do. At worst they record what they do in the best way they can (be it mic recording, camcorder or whatever) and get it to as many people as possible. Otherwise they could scrape together and book an afternoon at a small recording studio and go from there. You're calling people like Simon Cowell dumb? Yes people put money into new bands who have that something special. Every artist out there was a gamble of some sort to begin with surely?