Culture
Trance Family — Definition
'Trance family' is the term used by fans and artists to describe the international community around trance music — a self-identifying subculture that persists across ASOT events, Tomorrowland's ASOT stage, Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep gatherings, and dedicated club nights worldwide. The phrase is deliberately non-ironic and is used by artists including Armin van Buuren and Above & Beyond to address their audience directly.
The concept is closest in spirit to the 'raver' identity of the early UK and Dutch scenes, but it survived the genre's commercial decline in the mid-2000s largely because of the tight community-building work done by ASOT, Anjunabeats and Group Therapy Radio. It is one reason classic trance retains a much more active, event-going listener base in 2020s than most of its late-1990s peer genres.
In practice the phrase describes a set of observable behaviours rather than a sentiment: travelling internationally for specific events, treating a DJ's back catalogue as a shared reference set, maintaining tracklist and identification communities online, and sustaining attendance at nights whose core repertoire is twenty-five years old. Few electronic genres have retained an audience willing to do all four.
The cost of that cohesion is a well-documented conservatism. The same community that preserved the classic canon has also been the loudest constituency against tempo drift, pop crossover and stylistic change — the tension that produced the Who's Afraid Of 138?! campaign and the recurring 'is this even trance' arguments that follow every genre-adjacent release.