CD的沒落與音樂的永恆

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，全都扔在潮溼的公寓樓地下室裏，上面蓋着塊防水帆布。自1999年以來，我收到過很多推廣宣傳唱片——這是作爲專業音樂評論人需要面對的一項職業危害。

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年前基本停止購買CD，當時我得到了人生第一臺iPod，粉紅色的第一代Mini，我的生活被徹底改變，我可以隨心所欲地在任何地方工作，不用再扛着一堆塑料盒子和一臺笨重的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 Maroon 5 promos, the worst way to die.

有些唱片公司喜歡送實體的CD拷貝，而不是通過電子郵件發數碼文件，這有點強人所難——我知道這屬於“第一世界困擾”，但我住布魯克林。哪來那麼多地方擱這些？我有個同爲樂評人的朋友，有段時間家裏CD堆成山，幾乎佔滿了整間公寓。我設想過有朝一日消防隊破門而入，營救被埋在CD下面的他，一疊疊的魔力紅(Maroon 5)推廣碟壓得他動彈不得——這絕對是世上最爛的死法。

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 hawk CDs for this long.

從來就不太招人喜歡的CD唱片，正一步步走向物種滅絕。本月底，星巴克(Starbucks)收銀臺上那些賞心悅目的紙板貨架將不再出售CD，它們曾經和薄荷糖、意大利脆餅一起，隨時準備迎合顧客的消費衝動。星巴克的決定並不意外；真正讓人驚訝的是這家公司居然能賣唱片賣到今天。

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 tangible, tactile objects are well on their way out.

據尼爾森(Nielsen)的數據，CD專輯銷量在2015年下降了14.9%，相比之下，流媒體音樂銷量有整體提升。即便追求純粹的羣體中出現了黑膠唱片銷量的上升（尼爾森監測到的黑膠銷量漲幅達51.8%），作爲有形實體的音樂收藏還是在向消亡進發。

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 banal 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 crates 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.

十多年來那幾箱CD跟着我搬了不知多少次家，我堅定地認爲，總有一天會僱個人把它們都轉成MP3。這件事太無聊，太浪費時間，想到要自己去做，我寧可跟朋友一起被唱片活埋。地下室裏有些什麼唱片我基本上都記得，其中有些在eBay上應該還會挺搶手——如果我願意花時間去賣的話。我在做兼職DJ時已經不用黑膠和CD了。我會使用我的MP3收藏，還有一個iPad應用。然而我還是沒辦法處理掉那些在地下室裏發黴的CD。它們更多的是記憶，不是物品，不可能當垃圾扔掉。

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 savvy 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 inevitable end, a caffeinated march to the whimpering finale for the medium.

星巴克在1990年代中期開始賣CD，但過了幾年纔開始大規模分銷，差不多也就是我開始拋棄CD的時候——對這個咖啡公司和它相中的音樂人來說，這是個很好理解的商業決策。但這個計劃開始時，iPod正在興起，所以它反倒是宣告了CD的宿命：星巴克只是在延長一個不可逆轉的結局，這是一場注入了咖啡因的遊行，它的終點，就是這種載體的傷感告別。

Still, there’s a sense of nostalgia to it. I miss the old Virgin Megastore in Union Square, which shut down in 2009, and the visceral experience of flipping 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.

然而這裏面還有一些懷舊的成分。我想念2009年關門的聯合廣場維京唱片大賣場(Virgin Megastore)，還有在一排排的唱片中翻找、發現新專輯的真切體驗，挑選的方法可以簡單到只看封面有沒有意思，或者還有個法子更妙：去新唱片試聽臺，那裏有一個跳到下一曲的按鈕，和一隻細菌叢生的耳機。唱片公司送來的唱片，要把那麼多盒子拆開也是相當費時的——想起唱片盒上那些死活撕不下來的不乾膠貼——就像去圖書館看書。

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

如今我多數時候通過Soundcloud和Tumblr發現新音樂，這樣做方便太多，我的身體都不需要離開手提電腦，但這個過程不像以前那樣有種冒險的感覺。

The CDs stacked on the display cases at Starbucks didn’t just signify that Starbucks was hip, but that the coffee chain was set on asserting itself as a player in the music industry. Coffeehouse rock as a genre 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 compilation album from Sonic Youth. In critics’ circles, “Starbucks music” became derisive shorthand for music with no edge, music to buy on a whim.

星巴克貨架上的CD並不只是爲了彰顯星巴克的時髦，它還表明，這家連鎖咖啡館在聲明自己是音樂產業的一股力量。作爲一種音樂風格的咖啡館搖滾，突然變得真切起來，和諾拉·瓊斯(Norah Jones)這類輕鬆、清涼的成人當代樂(adult contemporary)緊緊聯繫在一起，有一段時間，只要去星巴克就免不了要聽到瓊斯的《遠走高飛》(Come Away With Me)。涉及的類型有民謠，有smooth jazz，甚至有些相當酷的音樂類型，比如著名紐約廠牌Fania的salsa，或是Sonic Youth的一張合輯。在樂評圈子裏，“星巴克樂”被用來嘲弄那些不溫不火的音樂，都是供人一時興起消費的。

It seems likely that as CDs disappear from big-box stores and coffee megachains, they will be definitively 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.

隨着CD從量販超市和大型咖啡連鎖店中消失，看來它的離去已經沒有懸念。我們願意放棄CD唱片的精準音質，轉而使用經過壓縮的MP3。雖然在我聽來，兩者的差別可以忽略不計，但音樂的聲音的確是稍微變差了一些。

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 formerly archaic music-storage medium: the cassette tape, which is newly in vogue among young underground punk purists and D.I.Y. record labels.

當然，對正經樂迷來說，用可觸摸的方式炫耀自己的音樂收藏不是什麼難事——通過這樣的炫耀，你不但能告知全世界你有怎樣的音樂品位，還能展現你是怎樣的一個人。眼下我們經歷的不只是黑膠唱片的風潮再起，而是一場小型的老式音樂存儲載體復興運動：其中包括最近在地下朋克純粹主義者和個人廠牌中很時興的磁帶。

In the ’90s, I had three or four plastic milk crates of cassettes that I lugged 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 entirely 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，我有三四個裝滿磁帶的塑料牛奶箱跟着我四處搬家，儘管我的錄音機早就沒有了。其中有一些至今無法割捨。即便我們把整個音樂庫全部數碼化，能有個東西拿在手上，總歸是一種更真切的體驗。它把音樂轉化成了物質商品，而不再只是一種抽象存在。

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 gadgets as iPods and hard drives.

不過科技並沒有把我們的實體音樂收藏趕盡殺絕。去年索尼(Sony)宣佈發明了一種新型磁帶，最多也許能夠存儲185TB的數據。目前這種磁帶並不面向民用市場，但也許有一天，樂迷也能用上它的某個變種，到時候他們會想，當初我們爲什麼要在iPod和硬盤之類沒用的玩具上浪費那麼多時間。