Armada Music

Armada's founding insight was that a weekly radio show with a global audience is a distribution channel, and that owning both the channel and the catalogue is worth more than either alone. A State Of Trance had launched in 2001; the label was built to supply it.

That structure carried trance through the mid-2000s, when mainstream attention moved to electro house and the superclub circuit contracted. Armada kept signing, kept broadcasting and kept touring the ASOT brand, which is the main reason the classic-era sound never lost continuous institutional support.

The Armind sublabel handles the harder and more classically-shaped material, and the Who's Afraid Of 138?! imprint was launched explicitly as a reaction against the slowing tempos of the early 2010s — an unusually direct statement of allegiance to the classic template.