Do you remember being a kid, and thinking about how cool it would be to carry your favorite music around with you and create the soundtrack to your life, just like a movie, while it was happening?

Congratulations, that became possible about five years ago.

Access is something that has fundamentally changed the music business as we know it, and the music business has spent the past decade or so dealing with this ever-increasing “problem.” Everyone involved is trying to make this shift work for them, and everyone still wants a piece of the pie.

Marketing has recently undergone the same shift, and the industry is starting to see the results.  This new “thing” called social media has finally reached a point where businesses have started to pay attention, and among the plethora of “social media experts” emerging, we’ve seen a lot of companies both large and small, start to use these tools and integrate them into how they do business.

I’m not saying anything new here, but it’s worth repeating.

What has changed is how businesspeople – marketers specifically – view the consumer.

Gone are the days of nameless and faceless consumers with voices even more limited than their buying power.  Now, everyone is an individual in a very public way.

We have more access to music – so we choose not to buy it and download instead.

We’ve started creating the soundtracks to our lives in real-time, and seek to fill the holes we see as we go through this process.

We have better access to discovering new bands, and through the magic of the Internet we can go from “wait, who?” to superfan in a short amount of time.

From a business standpoint, businesses can now see who buys their products better than ever before.  Am I a mom? If so, what’s my favorite food? Do I blog? How about Tweet? Do I have a MySpace profile or am I on Facebook? How public do I allow my Internet life to be, and how vocal am I about my preferences?

Consumers are no longer anonymous and faceless beings, and while the music industry always had a much closer tie to their consumers than some other industries, this change is still felt there.

The point a lot of people miss when talking about the increasing visibility and power of the consumer point is this: Consumers want to include you (sometimes) in the soundtrack of their life.  Your job as a band, as a label, as a manager, as an agent, or as a solo artist, is to make that choice easy for them.

They want to learn about your products if they’re so inclined, but they don’t want to be “sold”. They see through “selling”.

So be present. Be in multiple places. Be easily accessible, and give consumers the choice to include you in the soundtrack of their life if they want.