The era of big data and analytics is upon us and is changing the world dramatically. The field of Information Systems should be at the forefront of understanding and interpreting the impact of both technologies and management so as to lead the efforts of business research in the big data era. We need to prepare ourselves and our students for this changing world of business. In this discussion, we focus on exploring the technical and managerial issues of business transformation resulting from the insightful adoption and innovative applications of data sciences in business. We end by providing an overview of the papers included in this special issue and outline future research directions.

R ecent technological and market forces have profoundly impacted the music industry. Emphasizing threats from peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, the industry continues to seek sanctions against individuals who offer a significant number of songs for others to copy. Combining data on the performance of music albums on the Billboard charts with file sharing data from a popular network, we assess the impact of recent developments related to the music industry on survival of music albums on the charts and evaluate the specific impact of P2P sharing on an album's survival on the charts. In the post-P2P era, we find significantly reduced chart survival except for those albums that debut high on the charts. In addition, superstars and female artists continue to exhibit enhanced survival. Finally, we observe a narrowing of the advantage held by major labels. The second phase of our study isolates the impact of file sharing on album survival. We find that, although sharing does not hurt the survival of top-ranked albums, it does have a negative impact on low-ranked albums. These results point to increased risk from rapid information sharing for all but the "cream of the crop."

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The music industry has repeatedly expressed concerns over potentially devastating impacts of online music sharing. Initial attempts to control online file sharing have been primarily through consumer education and legal action against the operators of networks that facilitated file sharing. Recent legal action against individual file sharers marked an unprecedented shift in the industry's strategy. The focus now is on wellpublicized legal threats and actions on a relatively small group of individuals to discourage overall music file sharing. To determine the resulting impact of these legal threats, we passively tracked online file-sharing behavior of over 2,000 individuals. We found that individuals who share a substantial number of music files react to legal threats differently from those who share a lesser number of files. Importantly, our analysis indicates that even after these legal threats and the resulting lowered levels of file sharing, the availability of music files on these networks remains substantial.

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