Google insists, over and over, that it has no intention of getting into the content business. So how is it finessing its way into the music business? Very carefully.

The search giant is working on a new service that will provide searchers with streaming music, which sounds a whole lot like a content play at first blush. But Google will only be offering limited bits of music, and it will be relying on other companies–Lala.com, MySpace’s iLike and Imeem, sources say–to actually provide the tunes.

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Just in case anyone thought Time Warner had any lingering interest in NBC Universal, this ought to put it to rest: Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes just compared the proposed Comcast/NBCU deal with the disastrous one his company made with AOL nearly a decade ago.

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YouTube sneaked up on big media, then scared the hell out of them, then tried to do business with them, more or less unsuccessfully.

Now, three years after Google plunked down $1.6 billion for the video site, it seems to have figured out an approach that works for at least some big players: Hand over a chunk of the site to content creators, who get to control it, sell ads on it, program it with their stuff and share some of the ad dollars. Newest example, reportedly: Britain’s Channel 4.

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Time Inc. has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet. Publishers like the idea. What will Apple and Amazon say?

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Comcast says it doesn’t have a deal to buy NBC Universal. Does it want to buy NBC Universal? Ask COO Steve Burke and you’re going to get a confusing answer.

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Here’s the big media deal everyone has been waiting for. Or at least, here’s the report: Sharon Waxman of TheWrap reports that cable giant Comcast is buying all of NBC Universal from GE for $35 billion. Comcast says the report is “inaccurate.”

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More from the post-Q&A Q&A: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says major investors like Gordon Crawford support her, and that she’s in the market for medium-sized M&A. Here’s what she had to say.

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Rupert Murdoch has been pushing The Wall Street Journal to raise its prices. Here’s one way to try it: Levy an additional fee for subscribers who want to use the paper’s iPhone or BlackBerry apps.

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Is Time Inc. building a Kindle Killer? Nope.

A report suggests that Time Inc. wants to get into the hardware business and produce its own e-reader.

That’s something other publishers, like Hearst and News Corp., are actually doing or have at least mulled. But multiple sources familiar with the Time Warner unit’s thinking say that’s not the case here.

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There is no shortage of places to watch TV shows free on the Web. There’s a glut of them, really. But here comes another: AT&T Entertainment. How is it different than Hulu, TV.com, Sling.com, Fancast, etc.? It’s not.

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The Financial Times’s pay wall for its FT.com site has been a success. So what’s with the note warning wayward emailers?

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As Kara Swisher just reported, News Corp.’s MySpace has hired media consulting firm Media Link, along with Media Link President Wenda Harris Millard, to overhaul the social network’s sales group.

Here’s the complete internal memo from CEO Owen Van Natta, which describes Millard’s position as head of the ad sales group as an “interim” one, and announces that former sales boss Jeff Berman is out.

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Here’s the next step in the Associated Press’s attempt to adapt to the reality of the Web: It’s going to try to keep tabs on its stories, photos and videos via a “news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use.”

At first blush, the AP’s description of the program sounds a lot like an attempt to implement digital rights management–a lock-and-key system–for the news. But at least in this iteration, that’s not the case.

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Amazon has explained why it has been deleting some novels from its customers’ Kindles: It shouldn’t have been selling them in the first place.

Amazon says the copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″ that it removed, without warning, from some Kindles this week are “illegal”, because the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell them. Won’t happen again, the e-commerce giant says. Sort of.

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Buy an e-book for Amazon’s Kindle recently? You might want to check to see if it’s still on your device. Kindle users are complaining that the e-commerce giant has removed titles from their machines this week and given them refunds in their place.

What happened? The details are fuzzy, but apparently, a publisher that supplied Amazon with two George Orwell titles has decided that it doesn’t want to sell them via Amazon anymore. So away they went. Have at it, DRM-haters.

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