Eddie,
Your thought is one that I've had and still continue to have on and off.
An interesting story for you ...
I co-wrote a song with a friend and we put it up on American Songwriter's free web pages (americansongspace.com). We wrote the song at the beginning of 2010. A publisher who was sifting through the pages a couple of months ago stumbled across our song and asked us if she could represent it. We signed up. I must say, it felt pretty cool to actually be asked for a song

Now if we hadn't had our song out there in front of the public, we would never have gotten our publishing deal.
One thing that the American Songwriter website has is that it allows only people in the industry to hear the whole song. General public are restricted to a snippet of the song (when this option is activated).
All the best,
Noel