Charlotte de Witte Runs Away With the Techno Vote as 1,058 Votes Separate #3 From #10

Techno's fan vote shows two very different things depending on where you look. At the top there's a landslide. Below it, everyone is bunched together.

Charlotte de Witte takes first place with 85,330 votes. That is more than two and a half times the 32,756 that put Carl Cox in second. Charlotte de Witte alone has more votes than the six DJs ranked third through eighth put together.

A lead that big makes you check the numbers twice, but this one fits the rest of the profile. Among these ten, Charlotte de Witte has the largest Instagram following (6,441,652), the most YouTube subscribers (1,010,000), the biggest TikTok count (1,800,000) and the top credit score, 992. The vote doesn't look like a fluke. It looks like an audience that's big on every platform and also turned up to vote.

Second place is just as safe. Carl Cox's 32,756 votes are more than double anyone else's below, and the credit score of 977 is the second-highest on the board. The strength is clearest on the sites where DJs upload mixes: a Mixcloud following of 259,283, the largest in this group, and 574,197 SoundCloud followers. That SoundCloud figure is almost level with Adam Beyer's 574,778, the highest of the ten.

From Amelie Lens at #3 (14,389) to Nina Kraviz at #10 (13,331), just 1,058 votes cover eight names. Four pairs of neighbours sit fewer than 90 votes apart: I Hate Models and Sara Landry, Sara Landry and Adam Beyer, Indira Paganotto and Reinier Zonneveld, and Reinier Zonneveld and Nina Kraviz. With the field this close, a shift of a few hundred votes could reorder most of the bottom half.

That also explains why this order doesn't follow the credit scores. Within the group of eight, scores run from 929 to 941 and don't match where people finished. Adam Beyer has the highest of the eight (941) but lands seventh. Amelie Lens has the lowest (929) and takes third. Peggy Gou and I Hate Models share 938 and finish fourth and fifth. The fan vote rewards getting supporters to vote, not an all-round score.

Peggy Gou is the clearest example. Peggy Gou has the most RA followers in the ten (133,460), the most Last.fm listeners (851,181) and the second-biggest Instagram (4,958,055). Even so, Peggy Gou finishes fourth, 272 votes behind Amelie Lens. A large audience doesn't automatically mean a large number of votes.

The other profiles are built differently. I Hate Models has 636,000 YouTube subscribers, second only to Charlotte de Witte here, and a festival count of 421, the highest in this data. Indira Paganotto's festival count of 291 comes next, along with 1,711,475 Instagram followers. Sara Landry brings 1,495,723 Spotify monthly listeners to sixth place. From the tenth slot, Nina Kraviz holds the second-largest RA following (67,961) and 484,111 SoundCloud followers.

Nine countries fill the ten places: Belgium, the United Kingdom, South Korea, France, the United States, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands and Russia. Belgium is the only country to appear twice, through Charlotte de Witte and Amelie Lens, and both are in the top three.

Six of the ten are women, including three of the top four places.

On these numbers, the top two spots look settled. Everything below them comes down to turnout, with neighbouring DJs separated by anywhere from a few dozen votes to a few hundred. If you're backing anyone from #3 down, every vote really does count.