Last night I dreamed I bought a stereo. It cost £400 and looked like a pile of silver bricks from 1985, a big old Metal Mickey of a thing. Oh, but the sound. The music booming out from that thing enveloped me. It wasn't just my ears; I was listening with my whole body. It made me feel things! Then I woke up in my house, which has no stereo in it at all, and not even any CDs, because I have thrown all my music away. And I realised what an idiot I have been.

Over the past few years I have got rid of all my CDs, all my records, all my tapes. I even wiped my hard drive, leaving nothing on my iTunes. I used to live for music, and spend most nights of the week at gigs or in nightclubs. As a music journalist, I used to have so much sent to me that you could barely get into the spare room for bags of new releases. Promo CDs sent by record labels to be reviewed, in addition to all the stuff I had been buying myself since the age of about nine. Yet the digital age was starting to offer freedom from all this clutter, so when my career changed, and I moved house a couple of times in rapid succession, I decided it had to go. I would be free! I would stream music from the internet as the mood took me! Just like William Blake said, I wouldn't bind myself to a joy, I would kiss the joy as it flew.

(It is possible that the musicians who slog for two years to write the songs for an album, book studios to record them, sound engineers to mix them, people to design the album sleeve and print them, weren't madly keen on my streaming it online while they were remunerated with a 25p cut of the streaming company's advertising revenue, along with a couple of woodpigeons and a soap-on-a-rope as a goodwill gesture. I have a sneaking feeling they would have preferred to pay their landlord and sound engineer in cold hard cash.)

Still, they needn't have worried, as I have ended up only listening to Rihanna. On Spotify. They haven't even got all the albums. I don't even think they've got the ones I like. But I can't remember which ones I like any more. As Kelly Oxford writes in her new memoir, Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar: "I don't think I'm going to die soon, but I finally feel like I'm growing old. Like, I know there's a Lil Wayne and a T-Pain, but somehow I thought they were the same person. You can be sure you're getting older when your finger isn't on the pulse of pop culture but you're sure it is." In my case, though, I refuse to believe it's age, as nothing else about me has grown up in the past couple of years. Even having a child hasn't made me want to stop partying, like I thought it might. It's just the music that has died – because I started listening to it on my laptop.

Listening on my laptop wasn't so much making me think music shouldn't take up physical space – it was making me forget the aural space that music was supposed to take up. My ears stopped expecting so much from the sound. The songs were compressed; the quality decreased; the speakers just two little discreet areas on either side of my typing hands. The music sounded about as deep as an oatcake on there. There was no graphic equaliser or anything like that – if I wanted to experience the song with more dimension to it, I just turned the volume up. It's not so much that my laptop made all other physical forms redundant, it's that it made music so dull that I lost interest in music.

Tolstoy said that music was the shorthand of emotion, but it used to be my longhand. It was the place that drew things out and gave them poignancy. It was the place that drew out the short sharp words of feelings and turned them into illustrated sentences. I used to listen to Sufjan Stevens singing about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr, on a Bang & Olufsen stereo, and have conflicted thoughts about murder and cancer and love and the hole at the bottom of all of our souls. Now I listen to Kiss FM on the kitchen radio and go: ah, this is the one that goes bounce, oh, this is the one that goes boing; mm, this is the one that goes bing. They play Swedish House Mafia: music designed to do a three-point turn to. Or Bruno Mars, with the sort of music that would accompany a moment of transcendent emotional import such as putting a new toilet roll in the downstairs loo. And now it's Armin Van Buuren, with something that sounds like metal being thrown at goats.

Looking back, I wonder if I was trying to make a dramatic gesture. I didn't even really mean to wipe everything out, not like the artist Michael Landy, who destroyed all his worldly goods in 2001, using the empty C&A shop on Oxford Street to perform the act in public over a couple of weeks. "It felt like I was attending my own funeral," he said afterwards, "and I became obsessed with the thought that I was witnessing my own death." And why was it so hard? What was the final thing that he destroyed? The thing that he dreaded killing off most of all? His record collection, of course.

I realise, as I write this, that maybe I did it on purpose. Maybe, during a rough couple of years, I wanted to shut down that deeper emotional life. Well, things aren't rough any more, and I want my feelings back. So I'm off to look for a boombox that twists my melons and permeates my soul.