Texas-Based AudioGalaxy Grabs Attention of Online Listeners - and Lawyers.

Byline: Kirk Ladendorf

Dec. 24--Three-year-old AudioGalaxy Inc. has racked up some stunning popularity milestones for its music portal, which goes by the same name.

They include:

-- More than 15 million registered users.

-- 1.4 billion hits by users in November.

And to handle all that traffic, the company has a battalion of 430 servers sitting at the Inflow Inc. data center in North Austin.

And then there is the Web site's emerging status as a cultural icon: In the new ABC-TV show "Alias," the spy-babe heroine -- played by Jennifer Garner -- talks with a colleague about delivering information to another spy. She leaves word that she will put the information in an MP3 music file on AudioGalaxy.

Cool stuff.

Michael Merhej, the company's 25-year-old chief executive and co-founder, says he had never heard of the TV show until he received some e-mail from irate AudioGalaxy users wrongly accusing him of wasting money by paying to have the site's name plugged on television.

But Merhej sees another, less welcome indicator of the site's popularity -- more calls from recording industry lawyers who are fearful that their companies' copyrighted songs are being illegally shared by the site's millions of users. Some music sites have the recording…