Trance Family

"Trance Family" is the term that the global community of trance fans uses to describe itself, and it captures the genre's distinctive emotional intensity and the strong sense of belonging many listeners feel. The community treats itself less as an audience and more as a chosen kin group held together by shared response to a particular kind of music — the same names, faces, and country flags reappear at trance events around the world, with fans regularly travelling internationally to attend ASOT, Future Sound of Egypt, Above & Beyond's Group Therapy events, and Luminosity Beach Festival. The hashtag #trancefamily took off in large part because of A State of Trance. The widely cited origin involves Armin van Buuren reading a fan-held poster on stage during an ASOT broadcast and asking, "What is this trance family?" — the phrase circulated on Twitter immediately after, and the community adopted it as a self-description rather than a marketing label imposed from above. Once Armin began addressing crowds as "the trance family" from the booth on a regular basis, and Above & Beyond did the same at Anjunabeats events, the term became the standard self-reference across the genre. Local chapters now exist in most major cities and have become an organising layer for the broader community. Trance Family SF (San Francisco), Trance Family LA (Los Angeles), Trance Family Spain, Trance Family Germany, and dozens of similar regional groups host pre-parties, meetups before festivals, and recurring local club nights. Insomniac's "Meet the Trance Families of the United States" feature documents how these groups function as friends-who-became-family networks. Online, trance-focused subreddits, Discord servers, and Facebook groups maintain active community life between events; the regulars in those spaces frequently recognise each other in person at the next festival before they have ever exchanged names offline. The Luminosity Beach Festival, held annually at the iconic Zandvoort beach in the Netherlands, has become the de-facto annual gathering of the international Trance Family — a multi-day event where the community physically assembles rather than just appearing in each other's online feeds. Together with the wider Anjuna-aligned and ASOT-aligned event circuits, Luminosity is one of the events fans treat as a yearly pilgrimage rather than a casual ticket purchase. The term Trance Family is one of the most distinctive features of trance culture relative to other electronic genres, where audiences are described as "fans" or "ravers" rather than as kin, and the asymmetry says a lot about how this particular music gets received.