ASOT (A State of Trance)

A State of Trance (ASOT) is the weekly trance radio show launched by Armin van Buuren with Episode 001 broadcast on 1 June 2001. The show is now distributed across more than 100 stations worldwide — including roughly 80 FM affiliates — and reaches an estimated 41 million listeners in over 80 countries each week, making it one of the most-listened-to electronic-music radio programmes in history. Each episode runs for two hours and follows a recognisable structure of new releases and exclusive premieres alongside listener-vote features such as "Future Favourite" and the host's "Tune of the Week" pick, interspersed with unreleased "ID" tracks producers send to test crowd response before official release. Ruben de Ronde co-hosts segments, and Ferry Corsten has appeared as a recurring resident over the years. The programme grew out of a smaller initial format on Dutch radio in 2001 and went fully weekly as its audience expanded. From there it became a year-round event brand: the annual ASOT festival regularly fills large Dutch venues with multi-stage editions, and international ASOT shows have been held in Mexico, India, the United States, and elsewhere. Episode milestone numbers — ASOT 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, and the 25th-anniversary cycle that runs through 2026 — are treated as global trance occasions, often spanning multi-day events and live broadcasts featuring extended sets from headliners across the Armada Music roster, the label Armin co-founded with Maykel Piron and David Lewis in 2003. ASOT also functions as one of the genre's most important promotional mechanisms. A premiere on the show can take a track from unknown to internationally requested within a single broadcast cycle, and the ID rotation gives producers a multi-week window to test crowd response before commercial release — many famous trance singles were live IDs on ASOT for months before they hit Beatport. Together with Above & Beyond's Group Therapy on the Anjunabeats / Anjunadeep axis and Aly & Fila's Future Sound of Egypt, ASOT forms the spine of how new trance music reaches its audience worldwide, and the global "Trance Family" community of listeners largely synchronises its week around the broadcast schedule. Listener's note: a weekly two-hour ASOT broadcast is part of how this site's editor learned to recognise individual producers' signatures. The same names cycle through the show across months and years, and the regularity is itself a kind of musical education — you start noticing how a particular producer phrases a buildup, places a vocal, or resolves a breakdown, long before you've consciously decided to study them.