Armin van Buuren has released not one but two mix albums to mark a significant milestone for his long-running radio show and brand, A State of Trance. The Dutch DJ and producer has put out both A State of Trance 25 Years and A State of Trance 25 Years: Selected Highlights, a pair of projects that together serve as a retrospective on a quarter century of one of electronic music’s most enduring institutions.
Both releases feature contributions from a roster of artists closely associated with the ASOT world, including Above & Beyond, John O’Callaghan, and Markus Schulz. The presence of these names across both projects underlines how central those artists have been to the show’s identity over the years. Above & Beyond in particular have maintained a relationship with the trance community that stretches back to the early days of the genre’s mainstream breakthrough, while O’Callaghan and Schulz have each built substantial careers within the circuit that ASOT helped to define.
The decision to release two separate mix albums rather than a single definitive package is an interesting one. The main 25 Years album and the accompanying Selected Highlights edition suggest that the volume of material worth commemorating was simply too large to contain in one release. For a show that has been broadcasting weekly for two and a half decades, that is perhaps unsurprising. ASOT has outlasted trends, format shifts, and the broader boom-and-bust cycles that have characterised electronic music’s relationship with mainstream culture since the early 2000s.
Van Buuren launched A State of Trance in 2001, and the show quickly became one of the most widely distributed radio programmes in the dance music world, eventually claiming a weekly audience running into the millions across FM stations, online streams, and podcast downloads. That reach helped elevate not just van Buuren’s own profile but also the careers of the artists who received airplay and the labels whose records he championed. For many listeners, particularly those outside major metropolitan areas with limited access to clubs or events, ASOT was a primary point of contact with trance and the wider progressive and uplifting sounds that surrounded it.
Marking 25 years with a mix album — or two — is a format choice that feels appropriate given van Buuren’s roots. Before streaming playlists and algorithm-driven recommendations became the dominant way people discovered new music, the DJ mix was the medium through which taste was transmitted. A carefully sequenced mix communicated not just individual tracks but a sense of flow, mood, and editorial perspective. Van Buuren built his reputation on that craft, and returning to it for this anniversary feels deliberate rather than nostalgic.
The inclusion of artists like Markus Schulz also points to the international scope of what ASOT represented. Schulz, who is based in the United States and has long been associated with the darker, more driving end of trance and progressive sounds, represents a strand of the music that existed in productive tension with the more euphoric material van Buuren himself often favoured. That breadth was part of what made the show function as something more than a simple promotional vehicle — it was, at its best, a genuine survey of where the music was at any given moment.
John O’Callaghan’s involvement similarly speaks to the show’s reach beyond its Dutch origins. The Irish producer has been a consistent presence in the ASOT ecosystem for years, and his inclusion in both releases reinforces the sense that these albums are intended to represent a community as much as a single artist’s catalogue. Van Buuren has always been careful to position ASOT as something larger than himself, even as his own name has become inseparable from it.
Whether the two-album format will satisfy long-term listeners or feel like an incomplete archive is a question only the tracklists themselves can answer in full. What is clear is that van Buuren has chosen to mark this anniversary with music rather than ceremony, which is consistent with how he has always operated. Twenty-five years is a long time in any industry, and in electronic music — where scenes fragment, tastes shift, and yesterday’s headliner can become tomorrow’s nostalgia act with alarming speed — it represents something genuinely rare. These two releases are how he has chosen to acknowledge that.
