Bass on DJ Radar: Skrillex Leads a Field of 2,110, and Just Two Points Separate the Chasing Pack

Bass is less a genre than a federation. On DJ Radar it covers 2,110 DJs, and the current top eight tells you exactly what holds it together: low-end weight, rhythmic aggression, and a crowd that votes in serious numbers. Dubstep, drum & bass, and breakbeat all place artists in the leading pack — three distinct lineages, one shared obsession with the sub frequencies.

Skrillex holds the number one spot with a credit score of 923, built on 11,460 votes — the largest vote count on the board. The American dubstep figurehead also posts the biggest streaming footprint in the field: 22,231,503 Spotify monthly listeners, 7,670,126 Spotify followers, and 12,083,723 Instagram followers. The gap to second place is 48 points, the widest margin anywhere in this top eight. Whatever metric you prefer, the data says the same thing: bass currently has a clear leader.

Below the summit, the picture flips. Sub Focus takes second on 875, flying the flag for UK drum & bass with 4,377,215 Spotify monthly listeners. Then comes the real squeeze: Fatboy Slim (861), ILLENIUM (860), and Chase & Status (859) are separated by just two points across three positions. That is as tight as a ranking race gets.

Each of the three represents a different wing of the family. Fatboy Slim carries breakbeat — the only artist in this top eight doing so — backed by 7,641,169 Spotify monthly listeners and 2,619,287 Last.fm listeners, a catalog audience few in the field can match. ILLENIUM brings American melodic-leaning dubstep with 10,115,951 monthly listeners, the second-biggest Spotify reach on the board. Chase & Status anchors the UK drum & bass contingent alongside Sub Focus, with 4,959,137 monthly listeners and 68,838 Resident Advisor followers — the highest RA count here after Skrillex.

Zeds Dead (849) and Borgore (846) keep dubstep's grip on the leaderboard firm: four of the top eight carry dubstep as their main genre. Zeds Dead, the sole Canadian entry, drew 8,081 votes — more than anyone ranked above them except Skrillex and ILLENIUM — a sign of a fiercely engaged fanbase even where streaming numbers sit lower. Borgore, representing Israel, pulled 8,110 votes of his own.

Andy C closes the list at 842, and his presence matters more than the rank suggests. He is drum & bass royalty by reputation, and his 161,000 YouTube subscribers — the second-highest YouTube figure in this top eight — point to an audience that shows up for the mixes as much as the records.

Three things stand out from the data. First, geography: the UK places four of the eight leaders, the US two, with Canada and Israel rounding out the field — bass remains a transatlantic conversation with a strong British accent. Second, the dubstep–DnB axis: seven of eight artists work in one of those two genres, making them the twin engines of the family, with breakbeat as the veteran outlier. Third, engagement: every artist here cleared 7,500 votes, a floor that most genre boards would envy.

The headline is stability at the top and volatility just beneath it. Skrillex's 48-point cushion looks secure for now. But with three artists inside a two-point band, the next voting cycle could reshuffle the middle of this board entirely. Bass fans should keep watching.