Review: Chris Cornell 2007 North America Tour

A few weeks ago, I decided to take a five minute break and visit rock-icon Chris Cornell's website. In July, I was lamenting the fact that I would be unable to attend any of his summer concerts, set up to promote his new solo album Carry On, because of a trip to India and South Africa. Actually, I wasn't lamenting it all that much since I was excited to go abroad and Carry On was pretty bad. Anyway, I had heard a rumor that Chris would be starting a new North America tour and wanted to get a sense of whether I would be able to go to any of the concerts.

To my surprise, Chris was set to play at Northern Lights in Clifton Park, NY, on Nov. 10th. The venue is literally 0.9 miles from my parents' place! Within five minutes, I had already bought my tickets and had told pretty much everyone I know that I would be going to the concert. According to the website, Cornell and his touring band would be playing hits from his 13 album career, spanning bands like Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and Audioslave, as well as some of his solo work.

If that sounds incredible to you, get this: the concert surpassed my expectations on every level. The opening act, the multi-racial Earl Greyhound from New York City, brought in some hard, soul power to the proceedings. A nice little appetizer for ridiculously incredible stuff that was to come.

Cornell made a grand entrance with "Let Me Drown", from the Soundgarden album, Superunknown. Standing at 40+ years, mellowed out, and in the middle of a transition into an adult contemporary like-solo career, Cornell still came out and worked it like old times. A six song acoustic set (which I really enjoyed), including "Call me a Dog," "Like a Stone," "I am the Highway," and his now infamous rendition of "Billie Jean," along with "Arms Around Your Love" was the mellowest this show got. The rest of show featured Cornell screaming and slamming through vocally demanding selections like "Outshined," "Jesus Christ Pose," "Rusty Cage," "Ty Cobb," "Cochise," and "Show Me How to Live."

All in all, he ended up performing 28 songs, with a lot of Soundgarden and Audioslave for the (relatively) older and younger fans alike. I'm guessing its got to be hard to please everyone when sampling from your greatest hits spanning a 20+ year period. It's a testament to the quality, depth and variety of this concert that my only complaint was that Cornell did not perform "Burden in My Hand." No worries, though: the multi-song encore more than made that little point irrelevant.

I could go on all day praising this concert. Instead of doing that, though, I'm going to let the proceedings speak for themselves. Check out this snap and video clip. The sound quality on the latter is quite suspect, mainly because I was so close to the stage and, therefore, the speakers. I hope you can make out that this is a snippet from "Spoonman." Enjoy.

I paid $0.02

A few days back I talked about the new Radiohead album and the band's innovative "pay-what-you-want" pricing scheme. I also went ahead and asked people what they would shell out for the new tracks. While my sample was very small (thank you Maheer and James), I believe it is fairly representative: most people on various other blogs also commented that they would pay well above the $0.02 minimum for In Rainbows.

After a great deal of thought, I went ahead and officially purchased the new album today. I decided to pay the minimum price, which actually worked out to about $1.00 thanks to credit-card related transaction costs (45 pence). Why did I pay so little? My reasons were the following:

1) I am a poor student
2) I will probably end up spending $100+ for concert tickets and another $15+ for the official disc version of In Rainbows (which will feature an additional 8 tracks, including the sensational "Bangers 'N Mash")
3) If they are allowing me to spend next to nothing, why not? I can collect on all that extra consumer surplus.

What's even more interesting was how guilty I felt right after the transaction was processed. Here were my post-purchase thoughts in the order that they happened:

1) Man, I am a really bad Radiohead fan.
2) Other people will think I am a bad Radiohead fan when they find out how much I paid for this album.
3) I feel like I'm stealing: I would have paid so much more in the store. Another way of saying this: I paid far, far less than my personal valuation of the good.

I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would go through this reaction, conditional on what they paid for the album. After all, I think it is for the above reasons that people were willing to pay more than the required minimum in the first place, why we overtip waiters and waitresses, why we donate $15 instead of $5 for entry into a large public museum, etc. In this case, from the standpoint of a standard economic model, there is no rational reason to pay more, so the psychology behind this behavior must be quite rich. This is a long way of saying that aspects like signalling to other consumers (2) and guilt (3) play a large role in these decisions.

Any thoughts?

New Radiohead Album October 10th!

I just saw this NYT article about the new Radiohead album, "In Rainbow." Apparently, the album will be available on October 10th, and you can download it from the band's website. The price is - here is the kicker - whatever you want it to be!

This is mind-blowing on so many levels. First off, Radiohead has to be one of the most innovative bands ever, and their new album promises to be incredible. I know this because I've downloaded most of the new set they were playing live on tour last year and, even in the raw form, its amazing stuff.

Second, their pricing and distribution scheme is absolutely revolutionary. Here is an excerpt from the Times piece:

There is no maximum price, nor any other guidance, setting up what is may be the biggest experiment in digital-era music-industry pricing to date. What are people willing to pay for music? How many will pay full price? How will the average price compare to what a typical record company would likely have charged? Will people pirate it anyway?

I would love to talk more in depth about the economics of this here, but I just found out I was beaten to it: Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution gives his thoughts on this new scheme here. No worries: Radiohead and econ in the same morning? Rad.

Just a few weeks ago, I saw a report that Radiohead was finished with the new album and was looking to release it mid-2008 upon finding a new label. But I knew that was bogus because, for quite some time, frontman Thom Yorke has been talking about how he wanted to use the internet as a means of music dissemination. And I was right. Three cheers to Radiohead:

Cheer 1) Your music rocks
Cheer 2) Way to embrace the digital age
Cheer 3) You just made the rest of my 2007.

So I have some questions for you readers:

1) Are you a Radiohead fan?
2) How much would you actually dish out for the new album?

Your comments on this post are so important that I will randomly choose one of them to win a hitherto unnamed prize.

Finally, I whole-heartedly thank Wisconsin-ite Nick Rhodes for putting me on to Radiohead. Nick has great taste in music, and somehow everything he does has instant street-cred. He's good people.