NYC's Pivotal Dance Tracks Closes Doors to Offline Customers

By Matt Parish

Dance Tracks, the vinyl warehouse in the East Village that's supplied countless DJs with cutting edge and classic records for nearly 20 years, opened its doors for the last time on November 30, 2007. Known for its history of meticulous selection and expert advice from store clerks, Dance Tracks first opened in 1989 in the midstof New York's booming underground dance and house scene. The store built its reputation as a brick-and-mortar DJ shop by stocking classic reissues, vital remixes, overlooked dance music from every corner of the world and a host of records produced for the store's several in-house labels. While it always had plenty of must-have vinyl for whatever was most popular at the time, the store made it a priority from the beginning to stock all types of music, presuming the fact that "everybody in the world dances" and giving as many disparate artists and mixologists a platform for their music as possible.

In 2003, they set up an online storefront at dancetracksdigital.com, which continues to carry their name and forward-thinking attitude toward selling music. The website is home to an enormous online catalog for the shop's physical inventory. The site's 21 genre channels all come with their own up-to-date charts and store recommendations on top of access to over a thousand different labels and 13,000 artists. Users who log in are able to create playlists and subscribe to news feeds through the site.

On top of write-ups for every record in stock and industry blogs, the site has raised the bar considerably for specialty music retailers by offering mp3 albums at an incredible 320kbs, smooth preview controls of every album that run circles around most online stores' previewing abilities, and "Live-Ready" albums that come preformatted for use with the Ableton Live on-the-fly music creation, performance and production software. Though the store has always seemed like a haven for vinyl purists, trends in the DJ world toward CD mixers and laptop mixing have become entrenched in the scene and Dance Tracks head Stefan Prescott has turned a lot of heads with his open acceptance of software like Ableton Live.

In a note to customers on their website, the store said "These are changing times within the music industry, and just as the shop was central to the early growth of the scene, Dancetracks Digital will continue to evolve and push the music forward."