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About

Back in 2003, there was no Twitter. Facebook was something college kids would start using in a couple years. YouTube didn’t exist, Napster had just shut down, and MySpace was going to start that summer. The PS2 was in its prime, Seven Nation Army was on the radio, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy had just wrapped up. I was 35 years old.

I started Analog Industries because I thought I brought a unique voice to the then-infant music tech blogging arena. What you’re holding in your hand is the fifth iteration of that site. It brings together about half of the first iteration (the “Media Temple years”), all of the second (the “smg.org years”), all of the third (the “posiNet years”) and none of the fourth (the “Patreon years.”) Taken as a whole, it covers a fairly big raft of music tech (and normal) history. The comments have been recovered, where possible. Roughly 90% of all comments are in place for each post, and it’s fun to go through and see all these names. I met quite a few people through this site who are still dear friends, and made a lot of enemies with my shitty attitude. (Still working on that.)

All in all, it was and continues to be a document of my curiosity and creativity, and by the transitive property a history of Audio Damage. Now that I have successfully navigated the burnout that led me to stop in 2018, we begin the next 20 years of Analog Industries. There are some rough waters to navigate, but community is the best lifeboat.

mea culpa: I am GenX. You can’t get more GenX than me. I was born in 1968, and my parents were real-life boomers, both born shortly after WWII. I say that not as an excuse, but an acknowledgement that I come from a different time, and I was and am a music industry lifer. There is language in this blog that reflects my upbringing, age, and lifestyle. In browsing back, especially through the first five or so years, I regularly use the words “gay” and “retarded” to describe things, am frequently hilariously wrong in my predictions and advice, am ludicrously prejudiced against arbitrary methodologies and tools, and am often a raging asshole. I could fairly easily have an LLM woke-wash all the content, but that would be disingenuous, and the archive would be the lesser for it as it would lack the color that made it… weird. I’m happy to apologize for my behavior then and now, but I also happily own it. I was who I was, and I won’t deny it.

If you’re upset about the swearing, that’s just too fucking bad.

-Chris Randall
-October, 2026
-Bellows Falls, Vermont