How Group Therapy Became a Ritual, Not a Radio Show

Group Therapy started as a radio show. Above & Beyond needed somewhere to play the music they were making and signing on their own label, Anjunabeats, so they built a weekly broadcast around it. Most artist radio shows stay exactly that — a playlist with a name attached. Group Therapy didn't.

The turn came when the show stopped being something people listened to and became something people traveled for. ABGT100 filled Madison Square Garden in 2014 — a number in a show's name drawing a room usually reserved for arena tours, not radio anniversaries. That wasn't a one-off. By ABGT450, the show had moved through Drumsheds in London; by ABGT600, it landed in Mexico City in 2024. Each numbered milestone became its own event, in its own city, with its own crowd that showed up specifically because of the number on the poster.

What makes that unusual isn't the scale. Plenty of nights get big. It's that a radio show's episode count became the thing people organized their year around — the same way a football season builds toward a cup final, Group Therapy's numbering gave a recurring broadcast the shape of a pilgrimage. Nobody plans that. It happens because a show keeps being worth showing up for, week after week, until the accumulation itself becomes the occasion.

That's the part worth sitting with. Above & Beyond didn't build Group Therapy to become a ritual. They built a radio show to play music they loved, and did it consistently enough, for long enough, that the consistency became the point. It's a reminder that longevity in this scene isn't usually a plan — it's just what's left standing after everyone else stopped bothering to keep going.