E-business in entertainment: Insights from the use of Business Intelligence in the Norwegian music industry

摘要

Business Intelligence (BI) is a concept that has been widely used to describe technologies which support e-business by gathering valuable data, and provide analysis for decision making. This paper discusses BI in the Norwegian music retail industry. We contacted the two larger music providers in the country and examined their strategies in using BI in their when selling digital music. The key findings indicate that BI is useful in identifying customer preferences while it is less useful when predicting which music will sell, because music is a rather volatile product. Our cases show that users believe that existing tools are rather sophisticated but difficult to handle while emphasizing the need for a "personal touch" but improving data quality, based on intuition and experience. Our results can be useful to music retailers looking to improve their customer relationships and exploit the existing BI technologies.