A State Of Trance — The Complete Guide To Armin's Radio Empire

A State Of Trance is the weekly radio show Armin van Buuren has hosted continuously since 1 June 2001. It is also a record label (Armada sub-imprint, launched 2004), an annual world-tour brand (ASOT Festival, launched 2004), an annual listener-voted chart (the Top 1000, launched 2004), a yearly compilation mix (Yearmix, since 2004), and — via its Who's Afraid Of 138?! sub-label (launched 2013) — the single most-visible institutional defender of the classic 138 BPM tempo. If you want to understand why classic trance is still a living genre in 2026 rather than a museum piece, start here.

The show itself. A State Of Trance airs weekly, currently on Friday afternoons in Armin's Utrecht studio and simulcast to more than a hundred FM stations worldwide plus DI.fm, YouTube Live and the ASOT app. Each episode runs two hours; each episode contains between 25 and 40 tracks; each episode ends with 'Tune Of The Week', a listener-nominated record Armin promotes to the following week's mix. Over 25 years the show has broadcast every Thursday or Friday without a single missed week, including through the pandemic (recorded remotely from Armin's home studio for 18 months) and through Armin's own paternity leaves. Episode 1200 aired in early 2025. There is no comparable weekly institution in any other electronic-music subgenre.

The label. Armada launched in 2003 as a joint venture between Armin, Maykel Piron and David Lewis. The A State Of Trance imprint sits inside it and functions as the label's flagship trance-only outlet. Its two most historically important sub-imprints are Armind (progressive-and-uplifting-focused, launched 2007) and Who's Afraid Of 138?! (uplifting-trance-only, 138 BPM-only, launched 2013 as a direct response to the mid-2010s slowdown of mainstream EDM toward 128 BPM electro-house). WA138 is unusual: it is a genre-defending label rather than a taste-making one, and it exists specifically to keep the classic BPM range from being commercially abandoned.

The festival. ASOT Festival launched at Poppodium 013 in Tilburg on 24 April 2004 as a 3,000-capacity one-off event to mark the show's 150th episode. It has since grown into an annual multi-city touring festival — Utrecht is the flagship (typically 40,000-capacity at the Jaarbeurs), with satellite editions in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Ushuaïa Ibiza, and (until 2018) the Poland edition at Katowice. Each festival is a milestone-episode broadcast — ASOT 500 (2011), ASOT 600 (2013), ASOT 700 (2015), ASOT 800 (2017), ASOT 900 (2019), ASOT 1000 (2021) all doubled as live festival editions of the radio show. It is the most successful trance-brand festival franchise ever built, and it is still running.

The Top 1000. Every December since 2004 the ASOT audience votes on the thousand greatest trance tracks ever released. The list is counted down over a week of daily radio broadcasts in the run-up to the year-end Yearmix. It is functionally the trance genre's annual chart — a real-time popularity referendum on the classic canon, with the same records (Adagio For Strings, For An Angel, In & Out Of Love, Silence) rotating through the top 20 every year while new entries filter up from below. The vote regularly attracts more than a million ballots and is the most complete crowdsourced portrait of the genre's canon that exists anywhere.

The Yearmix. Every 31 December since 2004 Armin closes ASOT with a two-hour yearmix of that year's best tracks, mixed continuously. The Yearmix broadcasts function as the genre's own year-end retrospective, comparable to how Pete Tong's Essential Selection or Annie Mac's yearlist works for broader dance-music criticism. The 2007, 2013 and 2019 Yearmixes are widely cited by longtime listeners as the best of the run.

Why it matters for classic trance specifically. Most electronic-music subgenres that peaked in the late 1990s (jungle, big beat, French filter house, hard trance) either faded from active broadcasting or splintered into scenes small enough that no one platform speaks for the genre. Classic trance did not, because ASOT existed to keep the canon in circulation. Every classic-era record still gets re-tested against a mass audience through the Top 1000 vote every December. Every classic-era remix (Above & Beyond's rework of Silence, Andrew Rayel's rework of Universal Nation, Cosmic Gate's rework of Not Over Yet) is broadcast to the same audience that grew up with the originals. Every new producer trying to write in the classic style gets Tune Of The Week exposure, which is a genuinely meritocratic entry point into a scene where playlist gatekeepers otherwise dominate.

The criticism. ASOT has real detractors, and it is worth naming them honestly. The show is unavoidably Armin-centric — his own records, his own festival curation, his own aesthetic preferences drive what gets played. It has been criticised for over-promoting Armada-affiliated artists at the expense of independent releases; for the drift of the Top 1000 vote toward newer productions when older classics arguably deserve their positions; and for a mid-2010s stretch (roughly 2014-2017) when the show leaned harder into the harder progressive-and-tech sound then dominating festivals than into the melodic-uplifting sound its core audience wanted. The Who's Afraid Of 138?! sub-label was in part a public response to that criticism.

How to actually engage with it. Three entry points. First, subscribe to the podcast or YouTube channel — the full weekly show is free and archived. Second, listen to any Yearmix from 2007 onwards as a compressed two-hour snapshot of that year's ASOT-approved canon. Third, listen to the annual Top 1000 countdown week (usually broadcast the second-to-last week of December) as the most comprehensive audit of the trance-canon-as-it-currently-stands that exists.

ASOT is the single most important reason the classic-trance conversation is still live twenty-five years after the genre's commercial peak. Whatever else you make of it, that specific fact is worth taking seriously.