Psytrance on DJ Radar: Israel Sets the Pace as 1,014 DJs Battle for the Full-Moon Crown

Psytrance has always been electronic music's parallel universe — a scene that grew up on beaches and forest floors rather than superclub main rooms, built on driving basslines, hypnotic arpeggios and a tempo that rarely lets go. On DJ Radar, that universe is anything but niche: 1,014 DJs currently populate the psytrance board. But at the very top, the picture is remarkably concentrated.

Vini Vici holds the number one spot with a credit score of 874, backed by 10,470 votes — the largest vote haul in the top eight by a wide margin. The Israeli act's streaming footprint matches the ranking: 3,132,968 Spotify monthly listeners and 726,282 Instagram followers make them psytrance's most visible crossover force, the name most likely to appear on a mainstage billing far outside the genre's traditional festival circuit.

The 32-point gap to second place tells you this isn't a photo finish. It's a reign.

Look down the leaderboard and a pattern emerges immediately: four of the top eight acts — Vini Vici, Infected Mushroom (2nd, 842), Astrix (3rd, 836) and Bliss (6th, 810) — come from Israel, the country that has shaped modern psytrance more than any other.

Infected Mushroom's profile is a study in longevity: 1,042,022 Last.fm listeners, the highest on the board, alongside 822,267 Spotify followers. Astrix, meanwhile, actually out-polled the number two act with 7,893 votes, and pairs a 595,654-strong Instagram following with 481,389 SoundCloud followers — a fanbase spread evenly across platforms rather than spiking on one.

If the top three feels settled, positions five through eight are anything but. Protoculture (818), Bliss (810), Simon Patterson (808) and Neelix (806) are separated by just 12 points — the tightest cluster anywhere in the psytrance top eight, and the segment most likely to reshuffle by the next update.

Each makes a different case. South Africa's Protoculture holds fifth on 7,192 votes. Bliss brings an unusual weapon for the genre: 410,500 TikTok followers, comfortably the largest TikTok presence in the top eight, plus 380,703 Last.fm listeners. The UK's Simon Patterson — the board's strongest link to trance's progressive and uplifting lineage — counts 19,205 Mixcloud followers, a signal of a mix-culture audience that still values the long-form DJ set. And Germany's Neelix rounds out the eight with 771,814 Spotify monthly listeners, a streaming figure that outstrips several acts ranked above him.

The geography here is worth pausing on. Switzerland's Liquid Soul sits fourth (823, 7,528 votes) with 884,000 YouTube subscribers — the biggest YouTube audience on the board. Add South Africa, the United Kingdom and Germany, and you get a top eight drawn from five countries across three continents. Psytrance may have its spiritual capitals, but its leadership is anything but provincial.

The leaderboard sketches the genre's current shape: a festival-conquering crossover wing at the top, a veteran core with deep catalogue loyalty (those Last.fm numbers don't lie), and a chasing pack pulling the sound in different directions — toward trance crossover, toward streaming-native audiences, toward short-form video discovery. With over a thousand DJs on the board and only 12 points separating fifth from eighth, the hierarchy below the podium is very much still being written.