The first music I owned was on cassettes, but for as long as I've really cared about records (that is, not just buying compilations that had the singles I liked), I've bought music on CD. Even now, apart from the very occasional single, I still buy music as albums, on CD.

I have lugged my CD collection from home to home, back and forth between my parents house and university, and from flat to flat in London. Whenever I've moved in somewhere new, they were the first thing I would unpack. I've spent countless hours organizing and re-organizing them, with an ever-evolving system (organized by geography, era in time, and with related artists near one another.) At a moments notice, I could tell you exactly where any one of them was.

That is, until recently. Since moving house about a year ago, my CD collection has been in the back room, where they have sat more or less untouched since I unpacked them (only half organized), about a month or two after moving in. What used to be the physical embodiment of my treasured music collection is now nothing more than an artefact; a pile of plastic that was sitting on shelves in what will soon be my baby boy's bedroom. Just a relic of a different age, and a different set of priorities.

The reason is that, between 3 and 5 years ago, all the music I listen to has been moving over to a purely digital format; either through my computer, phone or iPod. First, my "mobile" listening changed, when a phone with an MP3 player made my CD walkman obsolete- too bulky to carry around, along with a stack of CD-Rs with a selection of my favourite tracks. Then it replaced the living room stereo. An alarm clock/radio with an iPod dock in the bedroom was the nail in the coffin of my CD collection.

So, as of last weekend, my CDs are all boxed up and ready to go into storage in a dusty attic. Apart from a select few favourites which I might want to take next time I need a hire car or something (even though I always forget to take some CDs whenever I actually get a hire car…) The next thing to go will be my music-making kit; guitar amp, synthesizers, samplers and effects boxes. (Most of which could now be replicated by a software solution anyway.)

It's funny how, rationally, I can't really explain why I still want to have them all to hand. I could talk about how I like the album art or liner notes, or how important of is to have the physical, tangible object that goes along with the music. But deep down, I know that they don't really matter to me— because if it was true, they wouldn't have been sitting virtually untouched for over a year. They are now nothing more than old furniture- like a lamp with a broken lightbulb that you don't replace because you don't use it, but that you don't throw away because you still like the lamp, and there's nowhere else to put it. Their light has gone out.

It's a purely emotional reaction; logically, I know that the space that they occupy in my flat is more valuable to me than the pile of plastic that's occupying it. Emotionally, I want to throw a tantrum…

The really strange thing though is that my son will probably grow up in a world where music lives "in the cloud", streamed over the Internet to a stereo or mobile phone— not burned on bits of plastic and boxed up on shelves, or stored on a device in your pocket, backed up from a big black box at home.

So if I ever want to explain what I've just done to my son, he probably won't really understand what I mean.

That's the thing about the youth of tomorrow; they don't know they're born…