A Dead Heat at 995: Inside the Top 3 DJs Worldwide

There is no daylight at the top of this ranking. Armin van Buuren and David Guetta are level on a credit score of 995, and Charlotte de Witte sits three points behind on 992. That is the full spread across the whole Top 3: three points.

The margin is only part of what makes this podium worth a closer look. The range matters too. Trance, Dance / Pop and Techno each hold a place, and the three DJs represent three countries: the Netherlands, France and Belgium. No single sound owns the top of the board right now.

With their credit scores identical, the clearest difference between the top two in our data is the vote count. Armin van Buuren holds 86,057 votes to David Guetta's 85,688, a gap of 369. It is a slim edge, but on a level score it is the column where Armin comes out ahead.

The voting behind them is just as close. Charlotte de Witte's 85,330 votes put her 358 behind Guetta and 727 behind Armin. Three very different genre camps, and almost identical vote totals.

Armin van Buuren's profile is broad and even: 15,152,615 Spotify monthly listeners, 4,796,482 Spotify followers, 6,200,000 YouTube subscribers and 5,033,425 Instagram followers. Add 1,738,312 Last.fm listeners, 1,187,795 SoundCloud followers and 2,500,000 on TikTok, and the trance flag-bearer shows up strongly on every platform we track. His 99,646 Mixcloud followers are also well ahead of Guetta's 17,892 on the platform built around long-form mixes.

David Guetta's numbers look exactly like the commercial profile his genre family suggests: 82,502,263 Spotify monthly listeners, 28,686,423 Spotify followers, 27,900,000 YouTube subscribers, 12,446,467 on Instagram, 7,000,000 on TikTok and 5,185,692 Last.fm listeners. He also leads the trio on Resident Advisor, with 152,250 followers.

Yet that reach did not win him first place outright. Whatever goes into a credit score, raw streaming scale is clearly not the whole equation. If it were, this podium would not be separated by zero points and then three.

Charlotte de Witte brings techno into the Top 3, and her position is the most telling part of the ranking. Her streaming totals are smaller in absolute terms, with 1,805,792 Spotify monthly listeners, 1,467,545 Spotify followers and 1,010,000 YouTube subscribers. Even so, her credit score of 992 leaves her within touching distance of first.

Her Resident Advisor following of 60,037 edges past Armin's 58,187, and our data logs a festival count of 202 for her. Her other platform figures are 6,428,539 Instagram followers, 1,800,000 on TikTok, 498,388 SoundCloud followers and 194,193 Last.fm listeners.

Step back and you see a global ranking that rewards different kinds of strength. Trance, commercial and techno each have one name here. Two of the three spots go to neighbouring countries, the Netherlands and Belgium, and France completes the set.

For fans, the takeaway is that no single genre has the top of the game to itself. A trance flag-bearer, a Dance / Pop powerhouse and a techno heavyweight are separated by three points on credit score and 727 votes. With margins that thin, this order is worth watching.