Until the moment Katie, 14, turns on her computer, the high school freshman is the recording industry's dream. She is from an upper middle-class family in Pacific Palisades has a healthy allowance, a curiosity about the latest tunes and a brother who works for Epic Records.
But when Katie slips in front of her PC and logs on to the Internet, she becomes the $40-billion recording industry's greatest fear.
"I get all my songs in [America Online] chat rooms," said Katie. "I don't buy albums anymore. I get my singles for free."
What alarms music executives is the simplicity of it all. Go to any search engine on the World Wide Web and punch in "MP3," the name of a compression technology that allows computer users to quickly download free, CD-quality songs.
Occasionally, the search uncovers songs legitimately up for sale by record companies, who will take a credit card number and allow the user to download a song.
But most often, people discover one of the thousands of Web sites offering pirated songs by well-known artists.
How big is this? After the word "sex," the phrase "MP3" is the most popular term searched on the World Wide Web, according to research by SearchTerms.com.
Despite ties to the software hacker scene, music pirates on the Net are not just disenfranchised teenage boys. They are medical students at UCLA, high school athletes, 14-year-old girls who live in quiet suburban neighborhoods.
And they are scaring the recording industry so badly, it is doing what was once unimaginable: waging war against young music pirates.
For the last two years, the Recording Industry Assn. of America has been working to shut down MP3 Web sites that house pirated songs and sending legal warnings and "informative" letters to site operators and university administrators.
It also launched a national campaign designed to scare college students away from MP3 piracy and convince universities to take a stronger stance against pupils who use their campus accounts to swap these files.
So far, at least three college students have been expelled and others suspended over this, Recording Industry Assn. officials say.
"When it comes to music pirates on the Internet, we will find them and shut them down," said Cary Sherman, senior executive vice president and general counsel for the association. "Somehow, some way, kids need to be taught that what they're doing is illegal and, in our opinion, immoral."
