The Stones headlined the Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto concert in Toronto, Canada, to help the city—which they had used for rehearsals since the Steel Wheels tour—recover from the 2003 SARS epidemic. An estimated 490,000 people attended the concert.
On 9 November 2003, the band played their first concert in Hong Kong as part of the Harbour Fest celebration, in support of its SARS-affected economy. The same month, the band licensed the exclusive rights to sell the new four-DVD boxed set, Four Flicks, recorded on their recent world tour, to the US Best Buy chain of stores. In response, some Canadian and US music retail chains (including HMV Canada and Circuit City) pulled Rolling Stones CDs and related merchandise from their shelves and replaced it with signs explaining why. In 2004, a double live album of the Licks Tour, Live Licks, was released and certified gold in the US. It reached No. 2 in both the UK and US. In November 2004, the Rolling Stones were among the inaugural inductees into the UK Music Hall of Fame.
The band's first new album in almost eight years, A Bigger Bang, was released on 6 September to strong reviews, including a glowing write-up in Rolling Stone magazine. The album reached No. 2 in the UK and No. 3 in the US. The single "Streets of Love" reached the top 15 in the UK. The album included the political "Sweet Neo Con", Jagger's criticism of American Neoconservatism. The song was reportedly almost dropped from the album because of objections from Richards. When asked if he was afraid of a political backlash like the Dixie Chicks had endured, Richards responded that the album came first saying, "I don't want to be sidetracked by some little political 'storm in a teacup'." The subsequent A Bigger Bang Tour began in August 2005, and included North America, South America and East Asia.
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