That’s what most people ask upon visiting Pollstar.com. Why does it take so many people to post tour schedules for a band like The Mavericks or artists such as Lucinda Williams or Loretta Lynn? Can’t some of the work be automated?

Fair question. After all, to the uninebriated, the 11,429 men and women that make up the Pollstar.com staff probably share a closer resemblance to a Mississippi neck-tie party looking for the guest of honor than a finely-honed research team trained to hunt down concert dates for all acts big and small. Heck, the total number of staff members dedicated to the Aerosmith tour alone numbers somewhere over 265 researchers. That is, if you don’t count the back-up employees.

Truth be told, we considered automating our workforce at one point in our corporate history. Yes, from the 931 people who unload the raw pixels off of the trucks each morning so that our machinists can convert them into the typefaces and fonts used to display the routings for The Von Bondies and Gossip, to the 1,532 workers who manually match up the days with the dates so that Rickie Lee Jones playing in New Orleans on February 6 is listed as taking place on a Friday, we once considered replacing every Pollstar.com employee with a machine.

But do you really want that? Do you want your tour schedules, such as the itineraries for Eric Clapton and Eddie Money, to come off of assembly lines like at those other concert-info Web sites? Do you want the impersonal feeling that a Charles Aznavour schedule, untouched by human hands conveys? Or do you want that aloof, unfriendly sensation when looking at a machine-assembled routing for The White Stripes or 311? We think not.

But why so many people? It’s simple. We believe in people at Pollstar.com, for it’s people who make the difference. People like the 4,471 employees who make up our news staff, the 7,391 hard workers who toil in the processing pits and 2 high school students who work after school in our customer service department. Sure, other concert Web sites would probably reduce a workforce like ours to three data processors and someone to answer the phone, but not us. That’s why you can rest assured that every single date, including the ones making up the listings for Rod Stewart and Bette Midler, has been expertly touched, handled, sniffed, felt, caressed, licked and fondled by each one of the 11,429 men and women who are proud, yet humble, to wear the official Pollstar.com jacket and beanie.

And you got to admit, when comparing us to those other concert-info Web sites, that makes all the difference in the world.