yeah, after spending some time reading the contract it's pretty obvious that it's a really shady sounding deal. Anyways.. I wrote em back and told em that unless they could adequately answered all my concerns, the answer would be no. It'll be interesting to see what kind of reply I get..if any.

This kinda stuff always reminds me of the first scam I ever came across.
Years ago before CD's became popular, so called "record companies" would advertise in local papers for you to send in demo tapes along with a $10 'processing' fee.
Basically, they'd keep your $10 and collect as many high quality Maxell tapes that they could get their hands on. The tapes were bulk erased and either sold for cheap to recording studios ... or re-used for their own demo's.

There are similar 'publisher' scams now where you pay a 'processing' fee of $30 to get access to a list of 'record companies' or indie filmmakers accepting demo tapes for soundtracks.
90% of the addresses on the list are either taken out of a book like the Indie Bible or they contain nothing but a yahoo.com email address (which obviously never works because their in-box is always full)

Personally, I don't even trust Taxi. $300 per year just to get a small list of contacts every once in awhile. And they have to approve every track you send in first.
The person listening to your demo could be just about anybody (high school students?) and considering the volume of material they get, they probably only listen to a small amount of your material.
So if the demo person is having a bad day or doesn't like your hair or something and checks off the [NO] box, you're screwed. Your music is rejected and you're not allowed to have it listened to by anyone else for that ad, plus you aren't allowed to know who the demo was supposed to be for.
The funny thing is the Taxi board where they have a forum where you can post your Taxi success stories. Last time I looked there were only 8 threads.