They will still sell an oldies' edition with the staid, fusty no-sparkly-vampires-or-pop-stars rule. It'll presumably be distinguished by tastefully monochromatic packaging (the regular pop-cultural edition will undoubtedly be printed in a vomitous mix of fluorescent colours, with the letter tiles in Comic Sans).
Update: the rule changes will not apply to Scrabble as such, but rather to a new "yoof-oriented"/"extreme" variant named "Scrabble Trickster". (Thanks to Jessamyn for that link.)
They'd need to put in about four Zs, worth 3 points each. And numbers. And a $ for Ke$ha.
Some rules for when TXTSPK is acceptable will be needed as well.
And the Scrabble dictionary will need to be updated weekly with the latest reality-TV stars and MySpace sensations.
I agree that this is a totally dumb idea. But as Lady Gaga says, "it doesn't make you cool to hate pop culture". Laughed out loud at the $ for Ke$ha idea! And yeah, I also reckon you'd have to boost the number of Z's and lower their value, otherwise something like "N-Dubz" would get a ridiculously high score.
While I'm on the subject, Kesha represents the absolute worst in pop culture, imho. She's clearly no more than a passing marketing gimmick and I doubt she'll be around for long (at least I hope not).
Pop culture has its place. That place, however, is not on a Scrabble board.
Given that this is such a minor change to the rules surely there should be just one set with two allowable word rule variations, to be agreed on before play?
Or will the new rules mean different scores on the tiles? For example, does the propensity of Zs in pop-culture dramatically alters the frequency distribution? What about all of the words spelt with numbers in them?