There was a time when you had to physically buy and keep music. The amount of music you had access to was a function of your ability to purchase it and store it. During such a time the value we put on music was higher and therefore we cared more about what we should expend our money, space and time on. Critical opinion mattered as a guide to what was worth of such devotion.
Now you can possess years of music in a mobile-phone sized device. If you're honest then you can have the same from a streaming service. The cost for streaming is less than what you'd pay for a CD so now the music you have available is effectively infinite.
The nature of criticism has also changed. Once you needed to convey the nature of music in words, so someone could picture what kind of music you were talking about.
Want to know what Lorde's Royals sounds like? Well there's a link right there. You can go and listen to it. Did you like it? Well then bookmark that link, now you can listen to it when you like.
The need to describe music has disappeared in the digital age. You can just listen. It's actually an improvement over the dreadful formulas of things like "Afrobeat Neu! meets Southern-fried rock".
What hasn't changed is the act of recommendation and curation. When I used to go to record shops I loved to delve into the stacks and find the little hand-written notes and stickers describing what was on the record or CD and why you shouldn't leave the store without it. That kind of loving curation (mostly by talented and aspiring musicians themselves) just doesn't exist in the anti-septic world of "likes". Comments on Soundcloud are mostly assine.
A record shop was also finite, you could exhaustively check all the sections once a week and be satisfied that between such obsessive trawling and the occasional kind under the counter reservation by the staff that you had seen everything that was available.
You can't listen to the internet. You need a like-minded friend to help guide you and you need to be a guide too.
I have a venerable blog about music that started in the era of obscure CDs issued by labels that didn't seem to last longer than a couple of years. Recently I decided to restart posting to it. Although I don't have amazingly obscure tastes I felt that culturally there is an embarrassment of riches and that while some bands and musicians are internet savvy and have their own websites and online presence there are still a lot where it is difficult to just Google the artist's name and find something relevant.
What I want to try and do is re-create that record store post-it, if for no-one else then at least for me.