Maybe I should post you some of the albums that you end up receiving when you work for a music magazine. The albums most people never get to hear (because music magazines either exercise their discretion in not reviewing at all... or give bad reviews to...)

Or, to put it another way, I can think of plenty of examples of terrible albums I've heard where I would far rather read a review of it – ten reviews of it – than listen to a single nanosecond of it.

There's also an aspect overlooked by those who say that a review makes no difference to their purchasing of an album. Namely that they might not have ever have got to hear about those albums were it not for the butterfly-effect of publicity,evaluation, recommendation, word-of-mouth etc that magazine reviews are part of.