According to this article Universal music may be looking for royalties on each iPod sale. Let's rewind a bit and see how funny this request really is. Two weeks ago Universal said that iPod owners were thieves. This came at the time when they were announcing their support of the Zune which seems to be under performing the weakest of expectations.

Going back further one sees that Universal, and their traditional music label comrades, didn't have much use for the iPod. When it came to be five years ago they seemed to think it was just another crappy MP3 player and who would care. Since then Apple Computer has managed to set the music distribution business on it's ear. Not only is it not a crappy player but with increasing ease we, the consumers, don't need the labels, or want the labels, to filter music for us. Instead we can go directly to the source and get music. Best of all our dollars go to supporting the artists not the same executives who think we're all a bunch of thieves.