That’s why we employ nothing but the finest atomic clocks at Pollstar.com. You need accuracy when you’re handling tour dates for Bob Dylan and Aaron Carter. Accuracy and a keen eye; for the tricks and traps of the concert industry are plentiful and often cruel. A date, say for Alicia Keys or Bowzer & The Stingrays, could change without warning and quite possibly injure or maim innocent bystanders.

“The future concert date is related to the present, as is the price of the ticket to the overall entertainment value of the show, multiplied by the length of time spent sitting through the support act,” wrote Albert Einstein in his renowned thesis; The Theory of Concertivity. But even Einstein couldn’t predict a Britney Spears date or determine if the dates for the Pat Metheny Group were as reliable as the sun’s daily march across the sky. Furthermore, Edward Teller, whose work on the H Bomb laid the groundwork for last year’s Diana Ross & The Supremes tour, to this day cannot vouch for accurate benchmarks to test the validity of a single Linkin Park date. Clearly, new methods and even newer ideas are needed to solve this age-old problem.

But how does one recognize the characteristics of a firm concert date? Is the schedule for Reverend Horton Heat carved in stone? Are the dates for Stars On Ice as solid as job security in the record biz? Is the routing for Janet Jackson as permanent as the current lineup for Guns N’ Roses? Up until recently, these questions were only hypothetical, a topic for promoters and physicists to kick around at the end of the day over a couple of cold brews.

Are all dates tentative? That’s the hypothesis put forth by Stephan Hawking in his monumental work, A Brief History Of Concert Time, where he espouses that a Diana Krall date does not become firm until a specified monetary amount is exchanged for a specially marked piece of cardboard. However, even this famous mind is at a loss to explain the routings for Jill Scott or the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

But there is an answer to the vexing question of how to distinguish between tentative and firm tour dates. And as you can probably guess, that answer can be found on the Internet. Often referred to as “Drudge’s Corollary,” it simply states that “the appearance of data on a network of inter-connected computers is validated by the very medium it transverses.”

In short; if you read it on the Net, then it must be true. We’re on the Net, therefore the dates must be accurate. It’s really quite simple once you think about it.