I CURRENTLY possess around six large moving boxes of compact discs tossed beneath a tarp in the dank cellar of my apartment building. Since 1999, I have been receiving promotional copies of CDs, an occupational hazard of my job as a professional music critic.

本人目前持有大概六箱CD，全都扔在潮湿的公寓楼地下室里，上面盖着块防水帆布。自1999年以来，我收到过很多推广宣传唱片——这是作为专业音乐评论人需要面对的一项职业危害。

I generally stopped purchasing CDs 11 years ago, on the occasion of my first, pink iPod, a first-generation Mini that revolutionized my ability to work virtually anywhere without the extra baggage of jewel cases and an unwieldy Discman.

我在11年前基本停止购买CD，当时我得到了人生第一台iPod，粉红色的第一代Mini，我的生活被彻底改变，我可以随心所欲地在任何地方工作，不用再扛着一堆塑料盒子和一台笨重的Discman了。

Now, when record labels send physical copies of CDs rather than email digital files, it seems like an imposition — I know, a real first-world problem, but I live in Brooklyn. Who has space for all of this? A friend of mine, also a critic, used to live among towers of CDs, to the point they threatened to take over his entire apartment. I imagined the Fire Department one day having to break in and rescue him from a toppled pile, pinned under stacks of Maroon¹ 5 promos, the worst way to die.

有些唱片公司喜欢送实体的CD拷贝，而不是通过电子邮件发数码文件，这有点强人所难——我知道这属于“第一世界困扰”，但我住布鲁克林。哪来那么多地方搁这些？我有个同为乐评人的朋友，有段时间家里CD堆成山，几乎占满了整间公寓。我设想过有朝一日消防队破门而入，营救被埋在CD下面的他，一叠叠的魔力红(Maroon 5)推广碟压得他动弹不得——这绝对是世上最烂的死法。

The CD, never a much-loved object, is inching toward critical endangerment. At the end of this month, Starbucks plans to stop selling CDs from those comforting cardboard counter-display cases, where they were as convenient an impulse buy as mints and biscotti. The company’s decision does not come as a shock; what’s most surprising is that Starbucks continued to hawk² CDs for this long.

从来就不太招人喜欢的CD唱片，正一步步走向物种灭绝。本月底，星巴克(Starbucks)收银台上那些赏心悦目的纸板货架将不再出售CD，它们曾经和薄荷糖、意大利脆饼一起，随时准备迎合顾客的消费冲动。星巴克的决定并不意外；真正让人惊讶的是这家公司居然能卖唱片卖到今天。

According to Nielsen, sales of albums on CD decreased by 14.9 percent in 2014, compared with an overall increase in streaming. Even with an uptick in vinyl sales among purists (Nielsen tracked a vinyl sales increase of 51.8 percent), our music collections as tangible³, tactile⁴ objects are well on their way out.

据尼尔森(Nielsen)的数据，CD专辑销量在2015年下降了14.9%，相比之下，流媒体音乐销量有整体提升。即便追求纯粹的群体中出现了黑胶唱片销量的上升（尼尔森监测到的黑胶销量涨幅达51.8%），作为有形实体的音乐收藏还是在向消亡进发。

I’ve dragged my own CD boxes from apartment to apartment for more than a decade, certain that one day I will hire someone to convert them all to MP3, a task so banal⁵ and time-consuming the thought of it makes me want to bury myself under the stacks with my friend. I can tick off most of the music I have down there, some of which would probably do well as eBay loot — if I ever bothered to sell them. When I moonlight as a D.J., I no longer rely on crates⁶ of vinyl and CDs. I use my MP3 collection and an app on my iPad. Still, I can’t quite unclutter the CDs rotting in boxes in my basement. They’re more memories than objects, impossible to trash.

十多年来那几箱CD跟着我搬了不知多少次家，我坚定地认为，总有一天会雇个人把它们都转成MP3。这件事太无聊，太浪费时间，想到要自己去做，我宁可跟朋友一起被唱片活埋。地下室里有些什么唱片我基本上都记得，其中有些在eBay上应该还会挺抢手——如果我愿意花时间去卖的话。我在做兼职DJ时已经不用黑胶和CD了。我会使用我的MP3收藏，还有一个iPad应用。然而我还是没办法处理掉那些在地下室里发霉的CD。它们更多的是记忆，不是物品，不可能当垃圾扔掉。

Starbucks has been selling CDs since the mid-1990s, but began a heavier push toward mass distribution a few years later, about the same time that I began swearing off them — a savvy⁷ business decision for the coffee company as well as the musicians it stocked. But the fact that its endeavor began around the rise of the iPod only sealed the CDs’ fate: Starbucks was simply prolonging the inevitable⁸ end, a caffeinated march to the whimpering finale for the medium.

星巴克在1990年代中期开始卖CD，但过了几年才开始大规模分销，差不多也就是我开始抛弃CD的时候——对这个咖啡公司和它相中的音乐人来说，这是个很好理解的商业决策。但这个计划开始时，iPod正在兴起，所以它反倒是宣告了CD的宿命：星巴克只是在延长一个不可逆转的结局，这是一场注入了咖啡因的游行，它的终点，就是这种载体的伤感告别。

Still, there’s a sense of nostalgia¹⁰ to it. I miss the old Virgin¹¹ Megastore in Union Square, which shut down in 2009, and the visceral experience of flipping¹² through the stacks, discovering new albums through means so simple as their interesting cover art or, even better, via new-release listening stations equipped with a skip-track button and germy headphones. If the label sent you the record, spending the time opening all that packaging — ugh, the impossible-to-open sticky tape on jewel cases — was still an investment, like reading a book in the library.

然而这里面还有一些怀旧的成分。我想念2009年关门的联合广场维京唱片大卖场(Virgin Megastore)，还有在一排排的唱片中翻找、发现新专辑的真切体验，挑选的方法可以简单到只看封面有没有意思，或者还有个法子更妙：去新唱片试听台，那里有一个跳到下一曲的按钮，和一只细菌丛生的耳机。唱片公司送来的唱片，要把那么多盒子拆开也是相当费时的——想起唱片盒上那些死活撕不下来的不干胶贴——就像去图书馆看书。

Now I discover most new music on Soundcloud and Tumblr, and while it’s infinitely¹³ more convenient insofar as it does not require me to physically¹⁴ part myself from my laptop, it doesn’t feel quite as adventuresome.

如今我多数时候通过Soundcloud和Tumblr发现新音乐，这样做方便太多，我的身体都不需要离开手提电脑，但这个过程不像以前那样有种冒险的感觉。

The CDs stacked on the display cases at Starbucks didn’t just signify that Starbucks was hip¹⁵, but that the coffee chain was set on asserting itself as a player in the music industry. Coffeehouse rock as a genre¹⁶ was suddenly quite literal, and associated with such easy, chill, adult contemporary acts like Norah Jones, whose “Come Away With Me” at one point seemed impossible to avoid at a Starbucks. The category was folk, it was smooth jazz, it was even certain types of really cool music like salsa from the famed New York label Fania or a compilation¹⁷ album from Sonic Youth. In critics’ circles, “Starbucks music” became derisive¹⁸ shorthand for music with no edge, music to buy on a whim⁹.

星巴克货架上的CD并不只是为了彰显星巴克的时髦，它还表明，这家连锁咖啡馆在声明自己是音乐产业的一股力量。作为一种音乐风格的咖啡馆摇滚，突然变得真切起来，和诺拉·琼斯(Norah Jones)这类轻松、清凉的成人当代乐(adult contemporary)紧紧联系在一起，有一段时间，只要去星巴克就免不了要听到琼斯的《远走高飞》(Come Away With Me)。涉及的类型有民谣，有smooth jazz，甚至有些相当酷的音乐类型，比如著名纽约厂牌Fania的salsa，或是Sonic Youth的一张合辑。在乐评圈子里，“星巴克乐”被用来嘲弄那些不温不火的音乐，都是供人一时兴起消费的。

It seems likely that as CDs disappear from big-box stores and coffee megachains, they will be definitively¹⁹ gone. We’ll trade the clinical sound of a CD track for its compressed MP3 counterpart. And though to my ear the difference is negligible, music will sound ever so slightly worse.

随着CD从量贩超市和大型咖啡连锁店中消失，看来它的离去已经没有悬念。我们愿意放弃CD唱片的精准音质，转而使用经过压缩的MP3。虽然在我听来，两者的差别可以忽略不计，但音乐的声音的确是稍微变差了一些。

For serious music fans, of course, there is no shortage of other tactile ways to show off a collection — and by doing so, send a message to the world not just of your taste but of what kind of person you are. Not only is vinyl on the upswing, but we’re even in the midst of a mini-renaissance of a formerly²⁰ archaic²¹ music-storage medium: the cassette tape, which is newly in vogue²² among young underground punk purists and D.I.Y. record labels.

当然，对正经乐迷来说，用可触摸的方式炫耀自己的音乐收藏不是什么难事——通过这样的炫耀，你不但能告知全世界你有怎样的音乐品位，还能展现你是怎样的一个人。眼下我们经历的不只是黑胶唱片的风潮再起，而是一场小型的老式音乐存储载体复兴运动：其中包括最近在地下朋克纯粹主义者和个人厂牌中很时兴的磁带。

In the ’90s, I had three or four plastic milk crates of cassettes that I lugged²³ around from apartment to apartment, long after I lost my tape player. I still have a few I can’t part with. Even with the notion of entirely²⁴ digitizing our music libraries, having something we can hold in our hands is, simply, a more complete visceral experience. It transforms the music into a material good, not simply an abstraction.

在九十年代，我有三四个装满磁带的塑料牛奶箱跟着我四处搬家，尽管我的录音机早就没有了。其中有一些至今无法割舍。即便我们把整个音乐库全部数码化，能有个东西拿在手上，总归是一种更真切的体验。它把音乐转化成了物质商品，而不再只是一种抽象存在。

Technology isn’t taking our physical music collections away from us entirely, though. Last year, Sony announced that it had invented a cassette tape that has the potential to hold 185 terabytes of data. Though it’s not currently aimed at individual consumers, it’s likely that one day music fans could get a version of it, and wonder why we wasted all our time on such useless gadgets²⁵ as iPods and hard drives.

不过科技并没有把我们的实体音乐收藏赶尽杀绝。去年索尼(Sony)宣布发明了一种新型磁带，最多也许能够存储185TB的数据。目前这种磁带并不面向民用市场，但也许有一天，乐迷也能用上它的某个变种，到时候他们会想，当初我们为什么要在iPod和硬盘之类没用的玩具上浪费那么多时间。