It wouldn't work in the United States. American retailers would complain about having to deal with three different versions of the same products.

European retailers might be a bit more open to this idea since they're not as obsessed with inventory management, but I see this sort of thing just confusing consumers.

Besides, when Universal tried to lower CD prices, retailers didn't play along.

i can see having 2 tiers - the normal and the bonus dvd/extra's - so many cd's get released that way now anyway...but a cd without any packaging would look terrible in the store and consumers would have a hard time finding what they want through all the generic looking cd's.

and yeah, the retailers did for the most part pocket the extra $$ from universal's price drop. they knew that most people thought of the record companies as greedy bastards and figured people would keep on blaming them instead of the retailers that didn't adjust the prices as they should. luckily, where i am the major retailers did lower the prices and playd fairly...a rarity in the music biz it seems.

Remember that retailers are dead, anyway.

There's a few still hanging on, but most CD retailers are gone or just loss-leaders for large department stores.

-s*

Maybe, I'm not sure.

But just image what it would do to the iTunes Store, if you can have the SAME music not crippled with DRM.

Some competition here wouldn't hurt...
Maybe, they eventually could get even lower then $ 9.99...

-t