Baby’s All Right, a club in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, is almost full when Ryan Schreiber arrives. A burly 41-year-old, he’s wearing a dark overcoat open to display a vintage Whitney Houston T-shirt. Schreiber, founder of the groundbreaking music website Pitchfork, gets a beer and threads his way through the crowd for a better view of Melina Duterte, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter who plays under the name Jay Som; her debut album,Everybody Works, recently earneda glowing 8.6 (out of 10) review from Schreiber’s site. He wants to hear how she sounds live, as he puts it, “before it becomes a job” for her.

Duterte is the kind of independent artist whom Schreiber set out to champion in 1996, when he started Pitchfork while living with his parents in Victoria, Minn. Along the way, he established what became the dominant voice of internet music reviewing. “It wasn’t the detached, scholarly take of aRolling Stone review,” says Alan Light, a former editor ofSpin andVibe. “It stood out for its insidery, hipster tone.”