"A lot of people from these Internet sites are at the conventions and that's the source of what they're writing about," Walker said. "Niche genre marketing has been bubbling under the mainstream and has certainly been part of marketing any film for a long time."
But if the king-making power is slipping off the broad shoulders of Rolling Stone, Spin Magazine or the big-city movie critics, who exactly is taking this responsibility?
At one extreme are widely read publications that have emerged wholly online and have simply grown to the point where their readership rivals any old-media giant. Independent record labels say a top review in the indie-music Web site Pitchfork Media, for example, has the ability to move records off shelves instantly.
Despite their popularity, Pitchfork and its ilk are little more than younger, hipper online versions of print music magazines. Somewhere in the middle of the new taste-making chain are bloggers, who publish their own reviews much as a magazine publisher would but often take a more active role as part of a like-minded community.
In the music world, a recent wave of MP3 bloggers have begun to serve as reliable and popular guides for sometimes hundreds of thousands of people at a time. These sites post full versions of songs, modifying the old review model a step further for the digital age.
True to the Internet's anonymous roots, many of the most influential bloggers had no intention of seeking a public voice at all — which is precisely why they have maintained credibility among their followers. One of the oldest and most prominent of these sites is the 18-month-old Music For Robots, which three friends started as an easy way to share music after moving away from each other.
Today, the site reaches more than 300,000 unique visitors a month, says co-founder Mark Willett. He and his friends are constantly barraged by record labels seeking to promote their bands and they have brought on several other writers to help fill out the site. One of the bands they have championed, El Ten Eleven, has even credited the blog for helping it secure a record contract.
Even the publishing world, often the last to adopt any high-tech innovations, is beginning to respond to the blogging subcultures.
John Lawton, director of online sales and marketing for Penguin, cited the campaign for the recently released "My War", a book by an Iraq veteran turned blogger. The publishing house sent advance copies of the book to a handful of other prominent writers in "milblogging" circles (those with a military focus) and advertised on several of the blogs.
"We definitely do this on a case-by-case basis," Lawton said. "Some books lend themselves to it more than others, such as genre books or younger authors."
At the other end of the new taste-making spectrum are communities that can help anoint artists simply by the power of aggregated likes or dislikes.
A prime example is the MySpace social network site, recently purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which has become so important in the music business that it recently announced the creation of its own label. The more than 500,000 bands and artists that maintain sites there provide streaming access to songs, interviews with musicians and instant networking with and among fans.
It's those connections that can spread likes and dislikes at the speed of gossip. Members can add people with similar likes into their personal networks, browse the favourite movies and bands of others and then add those groups as "friends".
Small labels have seen public awareness of bands rise sharply after reaching a critical mass on MySpace. Doghouse Records new media director Matt Rubin cites the case of one of his bands, The Honorary Title, which was one of the first groups featured on the front page of MySpace and now has had more than 35,000 people ask to be "friends".
"It's a more personal experience for people," Rubin said. "Younger fans love that. If they have the time, bands should do the whole participating thing."
Major label executives have said that it's nearly as important to have a presence on MySpace as it is to have a single on the radio.
"As I talk to our A&R (talent scout) guys, many of them spend a fair amount of time on MySpace," EMI's Klein said. "MySpace has become a critical mass in terms of volume and it is almost an instant market research unit."
Peer-to-peer networks have larger, faceless sample groups but can still provide valuable information about what people are listening to, as can "top download" lists from online music services such as Apple's iTunes, Napster or RealNetworks' Rhapsody.
All this is good news for consumers, who are only a quick Google search away from finding a blog or a MySpace network that shares their tastes and can recommend something new. The challenge for companies and artists is finding the right communities, blogs and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to target — which can be particularly daunting for traditional media executives who are desperately trying to retain the level of influence they have had in the days of analogue.
"There is a lot of noise out there," said Andrew Hawn, a media consultant for Iconoculture, a company that specialises in trend-spotting. "But there is wisdom in that noise somewhere."
