(I'm sure that you have seen these images tons of times... you can make them at Glass Giant)

Google are apparently going to be a part of Universal Music's attempt to compete with iTunes (so sayeth Forbes). The new system (apparently working in a similar way to the OneBox appearing at the top of your Google search results) is based on advertising space bought by Universal for each artists name. Rather unoriginally this will be called the gBox (I guess that if Apple did the same thing it would be called the iBox). Google will supposedly be earning from advertising rather than percentage of sales and there ads should start appearing as of August 21st. It seems to me that Google are on to a winner here - if it fails Google have still made money from it and if it succeeds then they will be an integral part of the system without Google necessarily being tied to Universal (they could just point the links to some other company's download page) but with Universal sort of tied to Google as that would probably be where most of their traffic was coming from.