Beesmax music stop is an online music store that was launched on December, 2nd 2009. The business noticed that piracy was the main issue in this country and many artists could not get their pay due to middlemen who sold copyrighted music at extremely low prices eradicating the original artist. I decided that I would form a kind of a with an artist who had registered with the music copyright board such that I could get their albums and post them on my site and each time your music as an artist is purchased it would only require 30% of the pay and the rest is yours (Hillstrom, 2010).
To be competitive enough in our genre, we had to come up with a business intelligence strategy that would suit me. I started an account on my space and twitter where most local and international artist posts their update on a new song that they are coming up with. I also frequently used goggles to find a site that is owned by the artist themselves, where they get to inform their fans of their new releases since we see music stores had to be updated of a newly released song by the artist. I also used youtube.com to find out which song had the highest views because this meant that the song was famous and needed to be on my site because sooner or later clients would begin to request it.
Every day I had to get up in the early hours of the night to log on to website to be able to see which new songs have come into the chart and know how to acquire them. As the demand grew I had to assemble a team that could assist me in getting all the information on music I needed. I divided the business intelligence team into, the marketing team, the researching team, and the IT department (3BI Consulting SA, 31 Jan 2011). The marketing team was responsible for passing the word about our business and handling clients’ orders. The researching team was responsible for getting business intelligence on which song to get and which songs were most liked. The IT team dealt with developing our database, our website, uploading music into our database, and making sure the mobile money transfer network was running (SAP, n.d).
In the beginning, hiring all these people was not possible but luckily I had a group of friends who were willing to help. I also got help from my so to call “cool friends” who were always updated on the latest music trends. The music copyright society also assisted me a great deal since they always informed me when a new artist came on board and how I could get their music (Imhoff, 2005).
I incurred a lot of stumbling blocks when getting started. The first obstacle to hit me was the fact that starting a website meant cash of which I didn’t have at hand. It was also hard to gain the trust of the artist since they had got used to being ripped off. Another stumbling block came in during the marketing level, I wasn’t a famous personality in the music industry and I dint have a way to reach the public. It took me close to three months before my site got recognition (IBM, n.d).
My breakthrough came in when a local presenter of a magazine show invited me to her show and there I had my first public announcement of the site. Amazingly the second day after the interview I got close to 500 subscribers who ordered songs on my site. As for now, I handle nearly 2000 orders each day and we are about to close a deal with artists from neighboring countries to also include their music On our website (Mantfeld, 2010).
To succeed in online music sales you need to have business intelligence in that you need to login into sites that are owned by musicians, you also need to be a “goggleholic” to be updated you will also be expected to join social websites and add artist as your friends to get information on new songs as soon as they release them. You also need to get information on laws on copyright to avoid violating copyright. All of this will lead you to a successful business enterprise.
References
Hillstrom, K. (2010). Gliebers Dresses: Stupid Marketers and Kewpon. MineThatData.com. Web.
IBM. (n.d). Business Intelligence. Web.
Imhoff, C. (2005). Business Intelligence Project Pitfalls. BeyeNetwork. Web.
Mantfeld, F. (2010). Top 10 reasons why Business Intelligence Projects fail. Seemoredata.com. Web.
SAP. (n.d). Business intelligence best practices: Phase one – do you have a strategy? SAP Community Network. Web.