Last spring, when Student Activities began to consider asking recording artist Jewel to play for a February concert this year, she was a rising but still relatively little-known act who was being compared to singer Joan Osborne, and her fee was $8,000. When Jewel was signed in early January, the cost had risen to $30,000. By the time the concert date arrived, she had garnered an American Music Award, appeared at the Grammy Awards and had her top-10 album "Pieces of You" go double platinum with two million copies sold. "I heard recently that her price just doubled," said Ben Jorgensen '92, director of student activities. Landing big-name acts for Colby concerts is not always financially possible, Jorgensen says, but luring bands that are "ready to break out" has been a Colby tradition. In 1991, the College hired a then obscure group called Spin Doctors for $2,500. The band soon had a hit album and lots of MTV play and was commanding $100,000 a show. A year before that, Phish, a band that now is one of the most popular college acts in the country, came to Colby for the paltry sum of $3,000. "The students really drive the [selection] process," Jorgensen said. "They have broad enough musical tastes that they have a good intuitive sense of what's coming up. And we have a very good agent in Boston." The Jewel concert sold out in a few days. On the day of the show, patrons queued up hours ahead of time, creating a line that snaked from the Wadsworth Gymnasium entrance down the sidewalk and across the athletic center parking lot all the way to North Street. The Indigo Girls appeared at the College on April 13. That show also sold out quickly, Jorgensen said.