According to Business Week, Universal Music’s Doug Morris is in talks with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group to put together a new music service dubbed ‘Total Music’ to compete with Apples iTunes store.

According to company insiders the companies hope to deliver a business model that sees hardware developers or mobile phone carriers absorb the cost of an approximately $5-per-month subscription fee so consumers get a device with as much music as they’d like that’s essentially ‘free’.

The business model would see the music companies collecting the subscription fee, while hardware makers supposedly move more units of the pre-loaded players… How this would then relate to the cost of players for consumers remains to be seen – given that you can currently grab an mp3 player for under $100.