From Correspondent Don Knapp

SAN RAFAEL, California (CNN) -- Over the 17 years that she's been playing her music and paying her dues, Jennifer McKitrick has been trying to become a rock star the old-fashioned way -- selling her records at shows and through mail order catalogues, sending them to radio stations in hopes that they'll get airplay.

But now, McKitrick's got the world at her door -- the World Wide Web, that is. Anyone, anywhere will soon be able to point, click and download her music for 99 cents a song.

"The idea is that instead of going to an online retail site ... and buying a physical CD and having it shipped to you, you actually can buy the song and download the song to your computer hard drive," says Gene Hoffman of Goodnoise.com, where McKitrick is one of the featured artists.

What makes this new way of obtaining music possible is MP3, a software program that speeds up the download time for music by a factor of 10.

Big record labels worry that MP3 will also make it relatively easy for pirates to steal and sell copyrighted music over the Internet. That's why the Recording Industry Association went to court to try to stop sales of the Rio, a pocket-sized digital music machine that can play music downloaded from the Internet.

The maker of the Rio, Diamond Multimedia, beat back the Recording Industry Association in court. So for now, at least, the $200 Rio is legally on the market.

For struggling musicians such as McKitrick, MP3 spells relief.

"I think what's actually good about this is that it gives the independent labels a chance to sell their music in the same arenas that everybody else is on," she says.