And it’s only going to become worse. Hand a music CD to a 10-year-old and ask her what it’s for. Most will never see a song as something that was imprisoned on a disc or a download that you had to pay for.

And it’s not just tweens. A few weeks ago, we had a garage sale at our house and I was willing to part with only about half my books. But when I looked over my collection of CDs and thought about what I wanted to keep, my answer was, um, nothing. There were hundreds of them, carefully collected for more than a decade, some of them gifts, some of them even recorded by friends or bands I had written about, but they’ve been idle for years. I priced them at a quarter each and then some guy offered $35 for the whole bunch and we caved. We even threw in the rack.

Books have retained some value in an evolving personal media ecosystem, partly because the physical artifact is more attractive than the plastic CD case (which can be opened only with a crowbar). CD collections no longer signify cultural identity. (LPs, which are making a niche comeback, are a different matter.)

Music’s jailbreak began almost as soon as songs could be rendered in ones and zeros. When Steve Jobs of Apple decided that the price for a song was 99 cents, he “saved” a record industry besieged by piracy by burning about half of it down. People ceased buying albums and bought only the songs they wanted, a disaggregation that wiped out inefficiency — which is profit by another name.

Between what I bought and what I burned, I ended up with about 7,000 songs. But guess what? I don’t listen to those, either. Why would I when I can mindlessly push a single button?

I wrote a profile of Neil Young a while ago in which he railed about the loss of sound quality, but as Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has said, “good enough is good enough.” The convenience of pushing a button on a handheld device that streams wirelessly to a speaker is always going to trump hunting down a CD with marginally better sound and plopping it into a player.

Think I’m the only lazy one? Sales of digital downloads dropped a whopping 13 percent in the first quarter of this year after falling 5 percent in 2013, which was the first year since the debut of iTunes that sales of digital music dropped. Apple has certainly noticed; Less than two weeks ago, it announced it would buy Beats Electronics in a $3 billion deal that includes a fledgling streaming music service.