Is Trance Still Popular? Yes, And Here Is What The Scene Actually Looks Like Now

Trance is not commercially dominant in the way it was between 1998 and 2003 — no trance record has been a UK Top 5 single since around 2004, the biggest EDM festivals bill house and bass-music headliners above trance ones, and the average pop listener under 25 encounters the genre mostly through TikTok edits of 'Sandstorm' or 'Silence'. But the genre is unambiguously still alive as a touring and recording format. What has changed is the shape of it, not the existence.

The touring evidence. Armin van Buuren's A State Of Trance events fill 15,000–40,000-capacity venues in Utrecht, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Bangkok, run continuously since 2004 and are still growing. Above & Beyond's Group Therapy 500 filled the LA Memorial Coliseum in 2022; ABGT 550 filled a two-night residency at the O2 Arena in London in 2024. Tomorrowland has hosted an ASOT stage every year since 2010; the Anjunabeats stage returned in 2023 after the pandemic hiatus. Dreamstate, the classic-trance-focused festival brand run out of the US by Insomniac, has expanded from a single 2015 Los Angeles event to annual dates in San Bernardino, San Francisco, Mexico City and Rotterdam. None of that is a genre in decline.

The recording evidence. Armada Music (Armin van Buuren's label group) and Anjunabeats (Above & Beyond's label) are both among the ten highest-grossing independent electronic labels globally in the mid-2020s. Black Hole Recordings, Vandit, Coldharbour and dozens of smaller boutique classic-trance imprints continue to release new records every week. The A State Of Trance Top 1000 vote — the annual listener poll that functions as the genre's own year-end chart — attracts more than a million votes annually and is where most classic-era records still get their annual re-testing.

The audience evidence. The 'trance family' identity is genuinely persistent — attendance at ASOT and Anjunabeats events skews older than at most electronic-music festivals (median age closer to 30 than 22), and the same audience returns year after year. In 2024 Above & Beyond's Group Therapy podcast crossed one billion cumulative listens; ASOT's weekly radio show remains one of the most-streamed dance-music podcasts in the world.

What has changed is where trance sits in the wider pop landscape. In 1999 you heard trance on BBC Radio 1 daytime; in 2026 you do not. The commercial oxygen has moved to Afrobeats, drill, hyperpop and the mainstream house-pop crossover (Fred again.., Peggy Gou, Bicep). The genre has responded by concentrating on its own institutions — the ASOT show, the Anjunabeats mailing list, the Dreamstate festival — rather than fighting for daytime radio playlist slots it will not win.

The other real change is generational. A meaningful slice of the current audience discovered trance not through 1999 club culture but through 2020s TikTok edits, video-game soundtracks (Rocket League's soundtrack has featured Monstercat trance since 2015), and the pandemic-era rise of trance-focused streams on Twitch and Mixcloud. That audience is younger, more American than European, and — critically — more interested in the classic era's canon than in the current release schedule. A whole cohort of 22-year-olds now know 'For An Angel' and 'Out Of The Blue' who have never set foot in Cream Liverpool. Whether that counts as trance being 'still popular' or trance being 'a heritage act' is partly a matter of framing.

The honest answer to the headline question: trance in 2026 is smaller than it was at peak and larger than it was at trough. It is unambiguously a living genre with an active touring circuit, an active label ecosystem, and a passionate multi-generational audience. It is not, and probably will never again be, the mainstream sound of a Saturday night in a superclub. But that specific mainstream moment lasted about five years for any dance-music genre; the ecosystem trance built to survive its own peak is what has kept it going for twenty-five.