Imagine you are the boss of an international record company.

The last few years have been depressing because the internet has created a means for people to get hold of music without paying a penny for it.

Just think what could happen in the long term - your profits might be affected! Something must be done.

That is the train of thought that has led to the music industry taking internet music swapping head-on in a titanic battle of wills.

On one side, the music industry: incredibly wealthy and able to pay lawyers to take people to court.

On the other side, the kids: ordinary internet users at home, school or even at work, who are quite happy to circumvent the proper channels for buying music and will always jump from one writ-threatened service to a newer, as yet unknown (to the lawyers) rival.

It is a game of cat-and-mouse that has been going on for years, ever since the spectacular rise and fall of the original file-sharing service, Napster.

Music makers are split on the subject.

Some think the industry should embrace the internet, give in to the inevitable and make all music available digitally.

Others claim record company profits are nosediving because of electronic file sharing and that investment in new talent will suffer as a result.

People will be less inclined to write songs if they think they will not get paid for them.

They say downloading songs from the net is a form of theft from the artists that produce them.

Madonna agrees.

The international pop icon recently decided to take on the illegal file sharers with her own succinct message: "What the **** do you think you're doing?" she asked, in a sound file deliberately uploaded to the myriad file sharing networks in the disguise of her new single.

The internet community responded in its own unique way.

Dozens of people took the message and remixed it, using Madonna's own records or those of others, and within days it was possible to download a whole album's-worth of variations.

The problem for the record companies and their lawyers boils down to one of the basic fundamentals of the internet: no one is really in charge.

No one has control over the internet. It remains an anarchic and ultimately lawless virtual reflection of the real world.

Sure, it has been invaded by commercial interests in recent years and has changed from obscure geeky hobby to mass medium, but still, no one is in a position to say what should and should not happen online.

It has taken the recording industry years to come to terms with the fact that even with an army of lawyers, it can do little to bring file sharing under control.

So the obvious alternative is to turn the whole idea to the industry's advantage, which is precisely what some companies have just done.

They have lined up to be part of Apple's big new idea, an online music service that is entirely legal and above board.

Called the Apple Music Store,(www.apple.com/music/store), it integrates closely with Apple's iTunes software, which has been updated to coincide with the launch of the store.

The service is alarmingly simple to use. From inside the iTunes program, users can call up details of hundreds of artists and more than 200,000 individual songs.

Just clicking on a song downloads a 30-second sample, and another click downloads the entire song, at a charge of 99 cents. Entire albums cost ten dollars.

For the time being, the new service is only available in the USA, although Apple says it is working on internationalisation.

The service has the backing of several record companies and is almost certain to attract a lot of interest from Mac users worldwide, especially as iTunes is by far the most popular music management program available for the Mac platform.

A Windows version of the service is bound to emerge sooner or later, since such an innovative idea cannot be expected to ignore the far larger Windows market.

But perhaps more importantly, Apple's move brings digital music distribution out from the underground and into the world of commercial reality.

The record companies will be watching the results of this experiment very closely and if it works, we can expect to see a lot more services like it in the very near future.