Classic Trax Limited is an ‘underground dance music’ Vinyl Record Dealer and Motor Racing Memorabilia Retailer, based in the UK with 26 continuous years experience in the online mail order / e-commerce industry.
We specialise in vintage Drum and Bass on Vinyl and Formula One Memorabilia. Two completely different worlds you might observe, but if you have a passion for anything, making an occupation out of it is never a bad thing! We love D&B. We love F1. Going by our worldwide customer feedback on multiple retail platforms, we are amongst the very best in the business.
Classic Trax was one of the first underground music retailers in the online space, starting our business way back in 1998. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun!
>> Fast forward to 2024: We are STILL serving up the best Drum & Bass, Jungle, Hardcore and Obscure Oldskool money can buy, as well as an eclectic mix of other musical genres. We also stock a hand picked selection of rare and collectable Formula 1 motor sport memorabilia.
Our vast music catalogue spans across 4 decades of electronic dance music, and in the last 26 years we’ve sold more than 140,000 units of vinyl (primarily D&B / Jungle) plus several thousand unique Formula 1 collectables, to our customers across the UK, and all over the world.
We’ll give ourselves a little pat on the back for contributing to the global distribution of these unique British dance music genres, and we take great satisfaction in sourcing interesting F1 items for discerning collectors far and wide.
We’ve seen the rise and fall of many record distributors, physical record stores, and online stores in the previous decades.
Classic Trax remains true to the cause, and is still going strong. We never gave up on the vinyl format, it’s still the best sound around. Apparently it’s coming back into fashion? As far as we are concerned, it never went out of fashion!
With 26 years of online trading under our belt, Classic Trax Ltd is the worlds longest serving Specialist Vintage Drum & Bass Vinyl retailer.
The History of Classic Trax (Music)
Going way back in time, fresh out of university, the fundamental framework and music database for Classic Trax was conceived in early 1998. Version 1 of our web interface was essentially a Microsoft Access database, coupled with some hand coded HTML pages, derived from a “Teach Yourself HTML” book. This was how our business was born on this thing called the internet, which few people even knew about.
We had a dial up modem on a PC, using an ISP called Freeserve, that gave a few Meg of space with the account to host our web pages, which displayed our stocks. It was all pretty rudimentary back then, but people discovered our service, emailed us about things they wanted to buy, and we started selling records to customers all over the world.
When we first started out, we built our reputation as a retailer of Classic Hardcore and Breakbeat from the early 90’s as well as Drum and Bass / Jungle that evolved through the mid 90’s onwards. The first record we ever sold was by Kaotic Chemistry called the LSD ƎP on Moving Shadow (SHADOW20). There was no better feeling than that very first sale. We got £20 for it.
By 2001 we had built a significant business, and it was time to upgrade the website interface to something so futuristic, it’s still ahead of it’s time today. Built as a collaboration between our graphic designer, based in Perth, Western Australia, and a well known UK based web agency that built us a bespoke content management system. The concept was to use an animated character, known to us as “Occo”, using the tentacles to navigate to the genres of music we sold. Version 2 is shown below:
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Our upgraded site featured streaming audio of all records listed, which was an immense workload to create, but it made the site ever more popular. It was also pretty costly too. We had to pay £8 for every GB of data delivered, so in the old days, we often had a £100 a month bill simply for allowing customers to hear audio clips of our records. If you think the internet is free, think again. Someone is always paying for the bandwidth and server that hosts the content!
Classic Trax was an early adopter of the latest technology:
– We were using Ebay to auction rarities in year 2000.
– One of the first UK businesses to offer Paypal in year 2000.
– One of the first UK businesses to integrate a payment gateway to accept cards online securely in 2001.
– We commissioned our trading platform to be built bespoke at huge cost. (There was no such thing as wordpress or shopify!)
– We used Overture keyword marketing and Google Adwords from the moment they were invented, until that market became saturated.
It all seems so normal now, almost unremarkable, but at the time, very few businesses had a grasp on this new technology.
In 2004 we implemented an upgraded web interface, again in collaboration with our graphic designer and web agency. By this point internet search engines were impeding our rankings because of the heavy use of Flash in our previous version, so our genre navigation moved into a drop down menu, combined with a fresh look. “Occo” was retired from navigation duties, but redrawn and reanimated to sit at the side of each page. Version 3 is shown below:
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By 2004 we were getting so busy, we had to get our web agency to develop a bespoke checkout that reserved records for a 5 minute window to prevent two customers from buying the same rare record or promo the moment we advertised it online. Complex stuff then, it cost us £800 to develop and test. Nowadays it’s a tick box and it’s free! I guess that’s progress?
We were buying from every record distributor in the UK that sold Drum and Bass, including SRD, Alpha Magic, Nu-Urban Music, ST Holdings, Load Media, Devil Fish, Vital and lots of other smaller ones like Destiny, Exodus, Good Looking, IMO Distribution and PDC Audio. It was a very hectic time. Sadly, most of them didn’t make it.
Over time things started to change. Digital started to gain traction mid way through the noughties and peoples buying habits changed. The big global recession killed off most record distributors, and ever since nothing has ever been the same again. Despite hard times we “battened down the hatches” and still continued no matter what.
Version 3 was our longest serving interface for Classic Trax, running up until the summer of 2016. At this point we were hacked by some lovely people in China, and with a heavy heart, we had to take the site down, because the costs of finding the vulnerability were not worth the time, effort and financial loss.
But out of bad, came good, because now we have Version 4, which was created in 2017, and you are looking at it right now. “Occo” still remains part of our branding, and is now incorporated throughout this latest site. Feels like things have gone full circle in a way, because now we often find ourselves tinkering with the site HTML just like we did when we started out all those years ago.
We are proud to continue running our business primarily selling a niche genre known as Drum and Bass. We never jumped on any bandwagon because it was popular or because we wanted to make a fast buck. We were one of the true pioneers of online vinyl retailing! We’ve been in it for the long haul, and we’ll continue serving up Drum and Bass on vinyl, because we still love it, even after all these years.
In our time we’ve purchased hundreds of record collections from the general public, but also from numerous well known figures in our UK music business, such as:
- Phil Wells, owner of the legendary Basement Records label and Nu-Urban Music record distribution business.
- Danny Breaks, Droppin Science label owner, and label manager of Suburban Base Records.
- Cyantific, prolific D&B producer on the Hospital Records label.
- Ben Watt from the electronica group ‘Everything But the Girl’.
- Jay Frenzic, owner of D&B Magazine ATM (originally Atmosphere).
The History of Classic Trax (Motor Sport)
Our sister business was set up in 2010, initially retailing used collectable diecast F1 model cars. As we built momentum over the next few years, we started to stock new F1 model cars from various UK wholesalers.
In 2012 we commissioned a new website to be built by our trusted web designer, and this online store ran for 8 years until the pandemic hit in early 2020.
Over the years we have expanded our range to include a large variety of other motorsport collectables, including Signed Photographs, Racing Cars Parts, Carbon Pieces, Rare Coins and Medals.
We’ve sold our F1 Memorabilia and Scale Models to customers across the globe. We’ve even had the pleasure of taking an order from Zac Brown, CEO of McLaren, for a vintage Lewis Hamilton Minichamps model.
Moving Forwards
We completed the process of amalgamating our two primary lines of business in Autumn 2021, to become the retail website that you are now on.
We strive to move with the technical evolution of the internet, although most small businesses simply can’t keep up. Our website regularly has little tweaks, fixes and new features added as needed, to make our online store one of the best online shopping experiences around.
Shop Vintage Dance Records, Vintage UK Flyer Memorabilia & Formula One Collectables – all on one site! You won’t find another specialist store like ours on Planet Earth.
When you browse and shop in our store, your details are safe, as our website is secured using SHA-2 and 2048-bit encryption.
We hope you enjoy browsing our diverse range of collectable products.
Make the most of our offerings, nothing is forever, everything is just a moment in time.
Trust #classictrax
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