From One Radio Show to a Genre's Centre
In 2026, A State of Trance reached its twenty-fifth anniversary. What began in June 2001 as a two-hour weekly mix on a Dutch radio station has grown into one of dance music's longest-running broadcast institutions — and arguably the single platform that has done the most to define what counts as trance over the past quarter-century.
The story is unusual in dance music. Most radio shows do not last twenty-five years. Most do not become global brands with their own festival circuit and listener-voted year-end canon. ASOT did both, and the 25th-anniversary moment is an occasion to look at how it happened.
The Beginning: 2001
Episode 001 of A State of Trance was broadcast on Friday, 1 June 2001 via ID&T Radio in the Netherlands. The host was Armin van Buuren, then in his mid-twenties and several years into his own production career. The first three episodes were titled Into Trance before the show settled on its permanent name from episode 004 onwards.
The live-event tradition began two years later. ASOT 100, broadcast from Bloomingdale beach club in the Netherlands on 5 June 2003, was the first on-location ASOT special — a small Dutch beach event that has since grown, via the ASOT 250, 400, 500, and 1000-edition milestones, into the multi-night anniversary festivals the brand is now known for. The weekly show itself is today co-produced with Ruben de Ronde.
Scale and Reach: A Global Platform
Twenty-five years on, the weekly broadcast has expanded into a global infrastructure. As of early 2026, ASOT has aired over 1,260 weekly episodes — episode 1262 went out on 30 January 2026 — and continues on its long-running Thursday slot. The show is syndicated through more than 150 radio stations across 84 countries, with a global weekly listenership in the tens of millions; the figure cited by the show itself has grown over the years and now sits in the mid-40-million range.
The format has stayed remarkably consistent: a two-hour weekly mix showcasing new and forthcoming trance and progressive releases, balanced across the uplifting, vocal, tech, and psy ends of the genre, with periodic Future Favourite / Tune of the Week votes and the milestone Tune-of-the-Year countdown. That throughput is what made the show a platform: for two and a half decades, ASOT has been the single most reliable channel through which new trance records reach a global audience.
The Anthem Tradition
One of the show's distinguishing traditions is the official anthem — an Armin-led production released to mark each major milestone episode and each annual festival edition. Anthems are usually built as full-length uplifting trance records and become long-running fixtures across the radio show and the live-event circuit. The canonical example is Gaia's “Status Excessu D,” released as the ASOT 500 anthem in 2011 (the title is the Roman numerals for 500) and still a regular set closer.
The 25th-anniversary anthem, marking the 2026 edition, is “Always You,” credited to Armin van Buuren, Richard Durand & Dicosis — the official ELEVATION-edition anthem of A State of Trance 2026. The track sits at the centre of the anniversary release plan and is the closing record across most ASOT-stage festival sets through the spring. The wider context for why milestone anthems matter to the 2026 cycle is covered in the Trance Revival 2026 piece.
The 25th Anniversary at Rotterdam Ahoy
The institutional centrepiece of the year is the 25th-anniversary festival, held at Rotterdam Ahoy on 27 and 28 February 2026 across two nights. The Friday programme is framed as a 25-years-of-trance journey — past, present, and future, organised around the figures who defined the genre across its run. The Saturday programme runs the standard multi-stage ASOT format, with the broader 2026 lineup including Ferry Corsten, Cosmic Gate, Aly & Fila, Rank 1, Markus Schulz, Giuseppe Ottaviani, Mauro Picotto, Laura van Dam, and many others.
Two anniversary-specific set pieces anchor the programme. Armin van Buuren closes the Friday with a five-hour solo set — a first for the ASOT festival format. On Saturday he performs a back-to-back-to-back set with Maddix and Oliver Heldens, an extension of the same trio's back-to-back debut at Ultra Music Festival 2025. The festival itself is paired with the release of A State of Trance: 25 Years — Official Anthem Collection, an Armada compilation gathering the canonical ASOT anthems from 2010 through the new 2026 ELEVATION anthem, released on 27 February 2026 to coincide with the opening night.
Twenty-Five Years On
What separates A State of Trance from most other long-running radio shows is that the broadcast is also a community. The weekly episode is one node in a connected ecosystem: a radio show that funnels new music into label release cycles, festival editions that turn that catalogue into shared live experience, an annual Tune-of-the-Year listener vote that lets the audience act as participants rather than recipients. The show calls its global audience the “trance family,” and the term has stuck because the structure produces something closer to a community than a listener base.
Twenty-five years in, that community is expanding rather than contracting. The mid-2020s trance revival — uplifting's return to the centre, the techno crossover, the founding-generation album cycle — is being broadcast through ASOT week by week, which is part of why the revival is reaching audiences as quickly as it is. For the broader context of how the 2026 genre cycle looks across all of its stylistic camps, see the Trance Revival 2026 companion piece and the TRANCE NEXUS timeline.