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As people willing to call themselves a geek know, the record industry is not doing so well right now. As such, recent news from the industry and record labels is showing that there is possibly a new type of album on the horizon. Apparently, the four major record labels (EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner) have been working on a new file format called called CMX that will make albums more useful to consumers by adding extra content. As the story goes, they approached Apple with this format, and Apple declined to join with them. It now appears as if Apple is creating their own format to compete with that of the record labels.

While it will be interesting to see how this turns out, The Unofficial Apple Weblog points out that Apple may be working on this (which they have code named Cocktail) simply as a precautionary measure in case they want to jump in on the popularity of it. Hopefully, they have been working for a while, as the launch date for the CMX format will be around November. It is definitely going to be interesting to see Apple create their own format (if this is true) with the ever-so-popular iTunes on their back.