Techno on DJ Radar: Carl Cox Leads a Field Separated by Single Digits

Techno is the deepest bench on DJ Radar right now: 1,803 DJs sit on the genre board. At the top, the picture is both settled and volatile. Carl Cox leads at rank one with a credit score of 912, backed by 11,760 votes — the highest vote count of any DJ in the top eight.

Behind Cox, the margins collapse. Sara Landry sits second at 899, and then comes a dead heat: Adam Beyer, Peggy Gou and Indira Paganotto are locked in a three-way tie at 897, separated only by rank order. From Landry at 899 down to Nina Kraviz at 891 in eighth, seven artists are compressed into an eight-point band. Cox's thirteen-point cushion over second place is the only comfortable gap on the board.

The voting tells its own story. I Hate Models, ranked sixth at 894, drew 11,670 votes — more than everyone above except Cox himself. Peggy Gou pulled 11,520, Sara Landry 11,430. Engagement isn't concentrated at the summit; the electorate cares about the whole top tier.

What's striking is how differently these eight artists build their audiences. On Spotify monthly listeners, Peggy Gou posts the biggest figure in the group at 8,088,576, with 1,133,128 Spotify followers and 4,658,647 Instagram followers to match. Reinier Zonneveld reaches 2,959,351 monthly listeners from seventh place, and Adam Beyer logs 1,315,488 — edging Landry's 1,145,344 and Cox's 1,118,000.

Other leaders index on different platforms entirely. Cox and Beyer each hold over 574,000 SoundCloud followers (574,197 and 574,778 respectively), while Cox's 259,283 Mixcloud followers point to a mix-driven audience. Nina Kraviz combines 484,111 SoundCloud followers with 2,041,536 on Instagram and 67,961 on Resident Advisor — second only to Gou's 133,460 RA followers in the group.

Then there's the road. Where festival data is recorded, the touring numbers are heavy: I Hate Models leads with 421 festivals, followed by Indira Paganotto at 291, Sara Landry at 273, Adam Beyer at 247 and Nina Kraviz at 240. That sixth-place ranking for I Hate Models starts to look different next to the largest festival count and the second-highest vote total on the board.

If one thing defines techno's leadership in 2026, it's geography. The top eight spans the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, South Korea, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Russia — eight artists, eight countries. No single scene owns the genre's summit. Women hold three of the top five positions, with Landry, Gou and Paganotto all inside striking distance of first.

The takeaway: Carl Cox remains the reference point, but with a 899-to-891 logjam behind him and vote counts running nearly even across the tier, techno's board is one strong cycle away from reordering. With 1,803 DJs competing in the genre family, the pressure from below isn't going anywhere either.