He does go on to say that it's 10-20 hours per week that they can do on nights and weekends for which they are paid. That said, I don't really disagree with your basic point. Under the appropriate circumstances, some limited paid contract work can make sense. For example, for an industry analyst job, we used to ask for writing samples. In retrospect, asking them to write something on a specific topic (and paying for them to do so), might have been a good approach. But 100+ hours of audition does seem awfully high to me.