Jim Svejda's program the Record Shelf would play recordings of opera vocalists of different eras doing the same songs, opera being, usefully, a genre where songs persist in popularity ( and also, a genre that lent itself well to purely acoustic early recording technology, which tended to do better with tenors and sopranos than, say, guitar). The artists who came up in the pre-recording days ( like Caruso, or Patti) were willing to take risks: jump for difficult notes and not swell into them, swing through hard passages - and they would sometimes have resulting mistakes, like slight imperfections in an attack. The modern artists would tend to sing very cleanly, flawlessly, without risking too much. This is what you'd expect: once you can play a song over and over, the mistakes become more apparent. This eradication of anything flawed has continued: Ella Fitzgerald recorded a number of great songs with her band, doing perhaps two takes per song, but often only one. Today it would be rare to find any studio recording that doesn't have many edits- hundreds, thousands- to fix small sounds, off dynamics, choose between fourteen or more takes on each section, and then splice them together.

The market for music also expanded. There was a huge unknown one in the rural areas for country music, which was revealed by the Bristol sessions. People who could not travel into a town to hear a fiddler could suddenly listen to one on a gramophone, and a whole genre appeared.

Another big impact of recordings was on the market for live music. The advent of juke boxes in the 1950's killed lots of gigs for musicians, especially jazz musicians.

Note that this is only recording- there would also be the advent of amplification technology not long after, which would make possible less-operatic voices, singing into microphones. And things like electric bass guitars, which enabled rock n' roll.