Take any of the major summer concert tours. Dave Matthews Band, for example. Fifteen, even ten years ago, routing a tour that stops at all the major venues would take weeks of calculations and planning. Mileage would have to be calculated, diesel fuel consumption estimated and multiple night stops in such places as Columbus, Ohio, and Hartford, Connecticut, would have to be carefully tested and re-tested. Then there are all those dates that would have to be sorted in chronological order before the schedule is finally released for public consumption. It’s no wonder that the concert pros of yesteryear often referred to routing tours as the “rocket science” of the live music industry.

But all that changed within the last few years with the introduction of certain software tools that make routing today’s tours, such as Avril Lavigne or The White Stripes, as easy as spotting NRA t-shirts at a Ted Nugent show. In fact, today’s software programs do everything but sign the contracts, leading some industry insiders to believe that the talent needed to plan a major tour is fast becoming a lost art.

“Back in the day, you’d have a team of agents sweating out the details for a tour by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers or The Rolling Stones,” says retired concert professional, Marty DiBergi. “You’d have agents picking the cities, other agents handling the dates, and even more agents figuring out the location of each state. Now it’s just point, click and play.”

What Mr. Dibergi is referring to are software products such as Concert Pro Tools, which radically reduces the amount of time needed to plan a major tour such as Green Day or Elvis Costello, leading many industry vets to bemoan what they perceive as the “fading art” of concert tour routing.”

“When I was a young man, we didn’t have all these newfangled devices like computers, cell phones and gadgets that can locate the closest McDonald’s or bail bondsman,” says DiBergi. Now all these young Turks have to do is enter the name of the act, like Terence Blanchard or Bowling For Soup, the name of the country, the price for the performance and how big a cut they want from parking and concessions, and bingo! There’s your tour.”

However, other people in the concert business claim that using such software packages such as Concert Pro Tools is merely the next step in making itinerary management easier, and point to the line of best selling books during the 1990s, such as Concert Booking For Dummies and The Idiot’s Guide To Jerking Around Support Acts, as earlier examples of the “dumbing down” of routing tours.

“Sure, those books were around back when I was routing tours for Anne Murray and Elton John,” says DiBergi. “But who has time to read when you’re trying to figure out where Cincinnati is, or what 10,000 Canadian dollars adds up to in real money? That’s what we had assistants for, to read the books. That is, if they were college graduates. Otherwise they just looked at the pictures.”

Coming up later this week: GPS locators, tour bus drivers and groupies. An accident waiting to happen? Stay tuned.