Hot Tracks

Hot Tracks was innovative and is a vital part of dance music history. To critique the re-edits/remixes from the company's early years and judge the versions by today's standards is a mistake. Contributors were some of the best DJs in San Francisco in the early 80's. With a mission similar to the east coast Disconet label (a DJ service based in NYC that in the mid-70's, began creating exclusive versions of dance tracks restructured for easier programming by club DJs into their nightly sets), when a track lacked a good intro or break due to the structure of the original or commercial release, the goal of the Hot Tracks mix was to format it so it was accessible for beat-match mixing and in doing so, resulted in frequently promoting tracks that would have otherwise gone unheard. The producers of these tracks were splicing reel-to-reel tape and thus lacked the ability for precision editing. Though the outcome can be thought of as substandard, it can also be thought of as reflective of the time and of the styles used during the early days of re-editing. Services such as Ultimix, which arrived in 1985, set standards whereby 8 and 32 beat sets in the re-edits were consistent and thus influenced other remix services to raise their own standards as the years passed. Many services focused on a specific type of music but Hot Tracks spanned multiple genres. Hot Tracks is one of the few remix services that earned the respect of the major labels and continued well beyond the 80's producing quality promotional versions for programming by professional DJs. The only bad thing that could be said is that not just anyone could purchase a Hot Tracks remix at the time, but now here with Discogs, you can!

The Hot tracks series really gave unknown songs exposure and also unknown dj's a hand at re-editing these tracks.
This service did some amazing edits and remixes but also some shoddy stuff too.It is all a matter of opinion really. They certainly brought the dj remix service into major exposure.... some of the Hot Tracks mixes being put out by the record labels (on 12" singles)
They really did help start the trend for remixing a track and giving an existing song a new and extended lease of life on the dance floor.

It's great that back in early 1980s, there were guys working very hard to make remixes of old club tracks using just some scissors and some Scotch tape. But when the mix disappoints (and believe me, Hottracks does), time and time again, it is hard to have respect for the author. Hot Tracks are famous for bad and unconsistent editing, unexpected mixing, and even changes in quality during the mix. Many of their ideas are plain unoriginal. My advice to you is to avoid Hot Tracks, and get the original versions back instead. . mixes, i'd recommend Razormaid re-edits to you any day over these.