He’s a brace-faced 15-year-old, small in stature but big in ideas. Not even old enough to drive, the Bettendorf boy has co-founded a new Internet music site that is attracting thousands of users a day and gaining worldwide attention.

It seems appropriate that his name is David, given the fact that he’s regularly on the phone with executives from Google, the Internet’s Goliath.

“He’s talking to some pretty powerful people,” said Mark Nelson, who co-founded Muziic.com with his son, David.

Muziic.com allows users to search for songs from the library of YouTube.com, which is owned by Google. The songs are played on the Muziic Player, a free, downloadable music player that David created.

In essence, David and Mark Nelson have created a free and, they say, legal site for listening to digital music. Because the music streams from a broadband connection off the YouTube site and into the Muziic Player, Muziic.com gets around copyright issues because the songs aren’t actually downloaded to an individual’s computer. YouTube has licensing deals with the record labels.

Ironically, it was another teenager — 18-year-old Shawn Fanning — who first turned the music world upside down by creating Napster, the first peer-to-peer file-sharing platform. Napster, where music was downloaded, wound up being sued by heavy hitters in the music industry, ultimately resulting in the cessation of the service.

“Typically, free music services are not completely legal; on the other hand, legal music services are not usually free,” David said. “My dad and I set out to create Muziic, the music service that is both free and legal.”

It hasn’t been easy.

The Nelsons said they tried to contact officials at YouTube before their site went up so that everything was above-board. However, they never received a reply.

But days after the Feb. 25 launch, the Internet began to buzz about Muziic, and Google representatives contacted the Nelsons, David said.

According to the Nelsons, Google had an issue with Muziic’s postage stamp-sized media player. “They said it needed to be bigger so that there’s more emphasis on the video,” David said.

The Nelsons made the fix, and now they say Google appears to be OK with the site. “Everything’s going very well,” Mark Nelson said. “The future looks bright.”

Google did not respond to requests for an interview.

Sean Moeller, a Bettendorf native who operates a successful, Rock Island-based music Web site called Daytrotter.com, applauded the Nelsons’ efforts. “It looks pretty cool and it seems they know what they’re doing,” he said. “But it’s going to be tougher for him because there have been negative connotations in the industry with those kinds of sites.”

Moeller, whose site promotes independent bands, said it will be easier for the Nelsons to find success if they can reach an agreement with YouTube. Dealing with the record labels directly would be much more difficult, he said. “When you start dealing with conversations with labels it really gets tenuous and mind-numbing.”

Moeller said the major record labels have been reluctant to embrace the digital realm. “They really haven’t figured out how to make it work for them yet.”

To that end, he said if the record labels find a way to make money off the platform the Nelsons have built, “they are going to be willing to play with it.”

It takes time to crack the industry, he said. “We’ve been doing Daytrotter for three years but I still feel like we’re a little baby site. We’re just sort of now getting into discussions with bigger companies and getting to the point where people are recognizing us in certain circles.”

Meanwhile, Muziic.com is seeing as many as 70,000 people per day log on to the site. Mark Nelson said they’ve heard from people interested in investing in the site, and it also is making money by featuring advertisements by Google.

The idea for Muziic came to the Nelsons about a year ago as they were eating frozen pizza and watching “Star Trek.”

Mark Nelson came up with the concept, and David replied that it would have to utilize a media player. “I said to David, ‘Can you do that?’ and David said, ‘Yeah, I can do that,’” recalled Mark Nelson, who works for Alcoa.

During the next year, the pair worked tirelessly at getting the site up. It took so much work, in fact, that David traded classes at Bettendorf High School for a private, online high school.

David taught himself HTML, a basic computer language, at the age of 8. He also had his own gaming Web site at that time. Mark Nelson said his son was drawing pictures on the computer before doing it with pencil and paper.

Diane Nelson said she’s proud of her son and husband. “They’re working on this every spare minute,” she said. “They knew there was an urgency to get this to market because it’s such a great idea.”

David said they knew the Web site would be “huge,” but he never expected so much attention. Enter “Muziic” into Google News and a long list of international news reports pops up. He still enjoys watching a clip of the national news in Germany, which ran a story about his site.

“We’re huge in Germany right now,” Mark Nelson said.