Steve Jobs is in negotiations with Universal Music about selling preloaded iPods, where the player will have a subscription attached to the device.

I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad idea, if I want music, I want to own it, and if you want me to rent it, I will just fire up µTorrent, additionally, eMusic is clearly threatening an antitrust lawsuit on this.

However, I do know that one thing is a bad idea, the idea of giving music distributors a cut of the hardware sales. There is a difference between making a subscription service available on your player, and giving a cut of each hardware sale to those distributors.

It is the camel’s nose under the tent, and it will be used ad precedent in future lawsuits against the hardware manufactures and against independent distributors of music.

It’s bad for the consumer and it’s bad for Apple.