Above & Beyond: The Trance Standard-Bearers Holding Court on DJ Radar

Some acts dominate a single metric. Above & Beyond dominate the spread.

The United Kingdom trance mainstay sits on a DJ Radar credit score of 904 — and, crucially, that score rests on 10,620 votes. That volume matters. A high score on thin voting is a rumor; a high score on five figures of ballots is a verdict. Voters across the platform keep returning to the same conclusion: this is what the top tier of trance looks like.

Look across the platforms and a pattern emerges — not one spike, but consistency everywhere fans actually live.

On Spotify, Above & Beyond draw 2,202,325 monthly listeners against 887,298 followers. That ratio tells its own story: well over a million people beyond the committed follower base are streaming this music every month. Trance is often caricatured as a genre that survives on nostalgia and festival sets alone; two million-plus monthly listeners is what active, current demand looks like.

The legacy platforms hold up just as well. Last.fm — a scrobbling service that skews toward long-memory, deep-catalog listeners — logs 851,179 listeners. SoundCloud, the natural home of the extended mix and the radio rip, shows 537,087 followers. YouTube adds 545,000 subscribers. Instagram, where DJ audiences and general pop audiences blur together, sits at 670,104.

Then there are the two numbers that say the most about *who* this audience is. Mixcloud, the platform purpose-built for full-length DJ sets and radio shows, shows 193,200 followers — a serious figure on a service where six digits is rarefied air. And Resident Advisor, the clubbing world's paper of record, counts 33,733 followers. RA skews toward underground and club-culture diehards; trance headliners don't always register there. Above & Beyond do.

Plenty of profiles on DJ Radar are lopsided — huge on one service, invisible on another, propped up by a single viral moment or one platform's algorithm. The Above & Beyond profile is the opposite: every channel, from streaming to social to the mix-show ecosystem, lands in the same broad band relative to the others. That's the signature of an audience built over the long haul rather than harvested in a season. People don't just stream the records; they follow the sets, subscribe to the videos, and show up to vote.

For a British act carrying the trance flag on a global ranking platform, that breadth is the whole argument. Trance has never lacked passionate fans; what it periodically lacks is acts who can carry the genre's case to the wider electronic-music public. The 904 score, backed by 10,620 votes, suggests Above & Beyond are doing exactly that — converting genre loyalty into platform-wide standing.

Strip away the affection and read the numbers cold: 2.2 million monthly Spotify listeners, six-figure followings on five separate platforms, a five-figure vote count, and a credit score of 904. There is no soft spot in that profile. On DJ Radar, Above & Beyond aren't riding a moment — they're the control group, the steady reference point other trance acts get measured against.

The genre's future will be argued over, as it always is. Its present, at least on this evidence, still runs through the United Kingdom.