It was just so futuristic. A pocket-sized puck of plastic, as thin as a piece of card; shiny, dazzling and mysterious. How did they get all those songs on there?

Were they held in the rainbow nebulae that shimmered across its mirrored surface?

And it required an actual laser to unlock it?

The first CD I owned was always kept in its jewel case, tentatively popped from its centre hold whenever it was played.

My whole being would be concentrated on avoiding contact with its reflective surface, carefully gripping only the circumference whenever placing it in my Alba mini hi-fi system.

A smudge or scratch could corrupt its content forever we were told, and please child, that laser could blind you.

Pretty soon I had the beginnings of a collection.

They looked good in quantity, lined up on my shelf.

The cases were neat and identically sized meaning the ten I owned could be quickly rearranged – one day in alphabetical order, the next categorised by genre, sometimes, should the notion take me, by the date of release or colour of the spines.

At secondary school, we would take in our pocket money depleting new purchases, swapping new releases with slips of paper pushed under the sleeve pointing out key tracks and lines to listen out for.

The advent of colour printing onto the actual top surface of the disc was an exciting leap of progress, swiftly followed by fold-out double discs.

Look at this single – a cardboard sleeve– how retro!

From the CDs we would make cassette mix-tapes – I had one for which the track listing for Side A read – Pulp: Common People x 4, Pulp: Disco 2000 x 3, Pulp: Mis-Shapes.

I really liked Pulp.

The real revolution though, at least in our adolescent brains, came with the writable CD.

Suddenly we could pool all our music to make mega-mixes.

We could create schmaltzy compilations for girls we were too scared to approach. We could provide ultimate soundtracks to the parties we never got invited to.

We could be DJs! Superstar DJs!

We’d copy and burn, copy and burn, berate the bands whose discs were spitefully protected from such practices, copy and burn.

Slick WordArt sleeves were designed and printed en masse.

Sharing was easy.

Everyone’s music was suddenly mine, and mine everybody’s, while each of our bedrooms slowly shrunk on account of all the stacks of plastic.

Everyone was at it. CDs were stuck on magazine covers, given out free with Sunday supplements, handed out at the exit to nightclubs and flung into the crowd after gigs.

They were everywhere. The compact disc was king.

The king is dead.

I’m slightly ashamed to admit it but, gifts aside, I haven’t paid money for a CD in years.

News this week of HMV’s collapse and precarious future suggests that you probably haven’t either.

Sales of CDs have long been in decline: according to figures from the BPI and the Official Charts Company, 25 per cent fewer CDs were sold last year than in 2011.

Meanwhile, digital downloads continue to dominate – although CDs still make up most album sales, of the 189m singles sold in 2012 a massive 97 per cent were downloaded.

Even paying for a song on iTunes is something more than many people are willing to do. Raised in a world where news and entertainment can be seen on your choice of screen free, paying for the privilege of listening to a band you might not like, or even one you do, suddenly seems a horrendously outdated and objectionable idea.

Any song you care to think of can be heard in an instant on YouTube, while the artists behind the few tunes that can’t feverishly issue copyright orders to pseudo-named uploaders that could be sitting anywhere in the world.

Their fight is increasingly futile.

Those stacks of plastic are now an abstract concept of O and I’s stored somewhere, out there, unable to be held or swapped, scratched or cracked but accessible anywhere and at any time.

Having a tangible version seems so unnecessary – and the compact disc’s limited aesthetic appeal leave them far less valuable than vinyl.

Today you’re just as likely to spot them being used as frisbees or hung on trees to scare away birds than you are seeing one placed into a CD player.

My own have long been resigned to a big box marked non-essential, their content now stored on my computer and phone.

I’m not even certain where that box is.

Everything points to our record collections soon being stored solely in our computers’ memories and online.

And while we can enjoy the music in the same way we always did, the joy of sharing, swapping, annotating and cherishing the physical form of our favourite songs could be lost forever.

That magical mirrored disc, a pass to the popular kid’s party, a tangible token of playground love, a badge of band fanship, the key to unlocking your international playboy DJ career – fast being replaced by a descriptive line on a computer screen.