Armin van Buuren

A law degree and a radio slot

Armin van Buuren was born in Leiden on 25 December 1976 and built a DJ career alongside a law degree at Leiden University, which he finished in 2003. The music arrived first. "Blue Fear" came out in 1997, and "Communication" followed in 1999, picking up traction in Ibiza over that summer before reaching number 18 in the UK singles chart in 2000 — a trance instrumental crossing into the British top twenty at a point when the genre was doing that regularly.

The decisive move was not a record but a schedule. In March 2001 he started A State of Trance as a two-hour weekly radio programme, and it has run continuously since. His own account of the format is that nothing structural has changed: asked about it in March 2026, he said the formula from episode one is still the formula in episode 1266. The show's distribution figures are large by any radio measure — its own material has cited close to 40 million listeners across 84 countries on more than 100 FM stations, with the 2026 anniversary campaign claiming 44 million weekly across 80 countries.

The apparatus around the show

The radio hour became the spine of everything else. Van Buuren co-founded Armada Music, which grew into one of the larger independent dance labels, and the A State of Trance name was extended into an annual mix album, an Ibiza-specific mix series, and a festival that now fills Rotterdam Ahoy for a weekend.

The compilations are still on an annual cycle. A State of Trance 2026 arrived on 8 May 2026 as the twenty-third yearly instalment, a 43-track set split into three mixes titled Pulse, Frequency and Energy — the first time since 2006 that the series had been rebuilt away from its long-standing format. A State of Trance, Ibiza 2026 followed on 28 August 2026, the thirteenth in the island series, again arranged across Pulse, Frequency and Energy, with tracks from Andrew Bayer, Giuseppe Ottaviani, Matt Fax, Solarstone, MaRLo, Richard Durand and others, and a focus cut, "Starbound", made with ASTRON4UT.

The albums under his own name have moved further from trance than the mixes have. The studio run goes from 76 in 2003 through Feel Again in 2023 and Breathe in 2025, and then sideways: Piano, also 2025, is an acoustic record of fifteen self-composed pieces with no dancefloor use at all. The formal recognition sits mostly in the earlier period — a Grammy nomination in 2014 for "This Is What It Feels Like", and an appointment as Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau in 2011.

What 2026 sounded like

The single run this year is the clearest signal of where his production sits. He opened 2026 with "Sun Shines on Me" alongside Glockenbach, and released two tracks with the techno DJ Lilly Palmer, "Ayi Giri" and "Dopamine Machine". On 22 May came "U Got 2 Know" with Hannah Laing and Wippenberg, a rebuild of Cappella's 1993 record. "No Mercy" with Adam Beyer — a straight collaboration with one of techno's established figures — landed on 26 June. "Here In My Arms (Enjoy the Silence)" with Silver Panda, a melodic-techno treatment of the Depeche Mode song, followed on 13 July, then "Everlasting" with SACHA on 31 July and "Burn It Up" with DIØN featuring Scufizzer on 14 August.

Two September releases point the other way, back at the catalogue. A remixes EP of "In and Out of Love", his 2008 collaboration with Sharon den Adel, came out on 4 September 2026 with versions by Ben Hemsley, NZGUL and Tai Woffinden. "Take Me Home", released on 25 September 2026, interpolates a Red Hot Chili Peppers song and had already been played live at Ultra Miami in 2025.

Van Buuren reads the genre traffic as moving in his direction. He has pointed to techno acts including Charlotte de Witte and ARTBAT working trance melodies into their sets, and describes the blurring of those lines as the thing he currently finds useful rather than a dilution of what he does.

Standing, measured

In the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs 2025 poll he placed fifth overall, was voted the world's number one trance DJ, and received the poll's Outstanding Contribution award. The ceremony was held at UNVRS in Ibiza on 30 September 2025 — the same room he would move his residency into a year later. He has finished first in that poll five times across his career, a tally now matched by David Guetta and Martin Garrix.

The festival side held up in 2026. A State of Trance returned to Rotterdam Ahoy on 27 and 28 February for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, with weekend passes at €174 before fees in the final pricing phase and official hotel packages sold out. The bill put van Buuren in a back-to-back-to-back set with Oliver Heldens and Maddix and included Cosmic Gate, Giuseppe Ottaviani, Estiva, Mauro Picotto, Korolova, Laura van Dam, Benwal and Tjade. He closed the weekend with a five-hour set drawn from the show's twenty-five years. The 2027 edition is already booked for Rotterdam on 26 and 27 February, with pre-sale registration opened on 25 August 2026.

The Ibiza residency, and the run after it

Van Buuren has had an annual presence on Ibiza since 2014, much of it at Ushuaïa, but the 2026 season is his first official residency there. It sits at UNVRS in San Rafael, the venue The Night League opened on 30 May 2025 on the site that was Ku Club from 1979 to 1995 and Privilege from 1995 to 2019, and which held a Guinness listing as the world's largest club in an earlier incarnation. The room is marketed as a hyperclub, with arena-scale staging and a high-resolution visual rig rather than a conventional booth-and-lasers setup.

The residency is arithmetic made into a booking: five Mondays, five weeks, five-hour sets. Van Buuren has spelled out the logic himself — five times five is twenty-five. The dates run 7 September to 5 October 2026, doors 23:30 to 06:00, with tickets from roughly €50 to €125 depending on the night.

After Ibiza closes on 5 October the calendar goes straight into a two-month international run: Brooklyn Storehouse in New York on 9 October, Factory Town in Miami on 10 October, EDC Colombia in Medellín on 11 October, the Gashouder in Amsterdam on 21 October and Amsterdam Music Festival on 24 October, Ultra Mexico in Mexico City on 8 November, an A State of Trance show in London on 14 November, Hypersonic in Melbourne and Sydney on 20 and 21 November, and Fairground Festival in Hannover on 28 November.