Charlotte de Witte Leads Techno's Top 10 as Eight DJs Crowd Into 13 Points

Techno's top tier has a clear leader, a clear runner-up and then a crowd. Charlotte de Witte holds the No. 1 spot with a credit score of 992, and Carl Cox follows on 979. The other eight names are packed into 13 points, from 941 at the top of that group to 928 at the bottom.

That is the most interesting thing about this list: the gap between first and second is exactly as wide as the whole spread from third to tenth.

De Witte's lead comes from strength across the board. Her 85,330 votes are the most on the list, and she also leads this ten on Instagram (6,362,083), YouTube (1,010,000 subscribers) and TikTok (1,800,000). Add 1,788,852 Spotify monthly listeners and a festival count of 202, and this is the most complete profile in the countdown. No single platform is carrying the score.

Cox takes second with 32,756 votes, the next-highest total here. Where Cox stands out is on DJ-focused platforms: the most Mixcloud followers of the ten at 259,283, plus 574,197 on SoundCloud and 59,366 on Resident Advisor.

Below the top two, the list turns into a series of ties. Peggy Gou and Adam Beyer share 941. I Hate Models and Sara Landry share 937. Indira Paganotto, Reinier Zonneveld and Nina Kraviz all sit on 934. In each of those ties, the DJ listed higher also has more votes (Gou's 14,117 against Beyer's 13,675, for example), but the score itself doesn't separate them.

Gou's profile leans hardest on listening platforms: she leads the ten on Spotify monthly listeners (6,293,326), Last.fm listeners (851,181) and Resident Advisor followers (133,460). Beyer's strengths are elsewhere. He has the most SoundCloud followers on the list at 574,778, just ahead of Cox, and a festival count of 247.

Of the seven DJs with a festival count in our data, I Hate Models logs the most at 421, along with 635,000 YouTube subscribers, second only to de Witte. Landry matches that 937 with 1,234,752 Spotify monthly listeners, 1,514,365 Instagram followers and a festival count of 273.

The three-way tie at 934 shows how different profiles can land on the same number. Paganotto brings 1,714,742 Instagram followers and a festival count of 291. Kraviz has the second-largest Resident Advisor following of the ten at 67,961, plus 484,111 SoundCloud followers. Zonneveld's numbers are unusually even across platforms: 149,000 YouTube subscribers, 144,208 Last.fm listeners and 144,002 SoundCloud followers.

The most revealing entry may be the last one. Amelie Lens closes the ten on 928, yet her 14,389 votes are the third-highest on the list, more than anyone outside the top two. She also brings 2,840,968 Instagram followers, 500,000 YouTube subscribers and a festival count of 218. Votes clearly count, but they aren't the whole credit score, and Lens is the clearest example of that here.

Six of the ten are women, and nine countries are represented. Belgium is the only country to appear twice, and it bookends the countdown, with de Witte at the top and Lens at the bottom. The rest are spread across the United Kingdom, South Korea, Sweden, France, the United States, Spain, the Netherlands and Russia.

Taken together, this ranking has one runaway leader, a firm second and a deep field where score gaps are single digits or zero. With eight DJs inside 13 points, the middle of this table is where the real contest is.