Top 10 DJs in Iceland: Bjarki Edges Kiasmos in a 57-Vote Photo Finish

Iceland's electronic scene has always punched above its population, and this year's fan vote proves the point with a genuinely dramatic finish. Bjarki takes the #1 spot with 6,423 votes, holding off Kiasmos at 6,366 — a margin of just 57 votes. That is a photo finish by any standard, and it gets more interesting when you look at the credit scores: Kiasmos actually posts the higher figure, 786 to Bjarki's 763. The fans, in other words, overruled the metrics — narrowly.

The two make for a fascinating contrast at the top. Bjarki is a techno artist with a committed, evenly distributed base — 42,040 Spotify monthly listeners, 40,165 SoundCloud followers, 72,074 Last.fm listeners and 12,807 followers on Resident Advisor. Kiasmos operates at a different streaming scale entirely, with 668,243 monthly listeners on Spotify, 310,569 Spotify followers and 342,451 Last.fm listeners, plus the strongest RA presence in the field at 27,377 followers. That reach didn't translate into a vote win, which tells you something about how this poll works: it rewards the artists fans actively show up for, not just the ones they stream.

Janus Rasmussen completes an unusually tight podium at #3 with 6,178 votes — only 245 behind the leader — and breaks the techno grip with deep house. His 397,659 Spotify monthly listeners make him the second-biggest streamer in the ranking, and a healthy 17,599 Instagram following suggests an audience that engages beyond the play button.

Below the podium, the field opens up. Exos, at #4 with 4,971 votes, is the ranking's veteran road warrior: 103 festival appearances, the most of anyone on this list, backed by a solid techno profile across SoundCloud (19,650 followers) and RA (4,890). RAFO rounds out the top five with 4,540 votes and 48,432 Spotify monthly listeners, giving deep house its second representative in the top half.

The back half of the table is where Iceland's scene shows its character. Agzilla at #6 is the lone drum & bass entry, and 2,881 votes against a modest streaming footprint — 136 Spotify monthly listeners — points to a following built in rooms rather than on platforms, with 14 festivals on the ledger to back that up. Izleifur at #7 leads the electronica contingent with 1,671 votes and a notably Instagram-forward presence at 5,737 followers. einarIndra brings house music into the frame at #8 with 1,406 votes.

The final two positions are close enough to matter: Stereo Hypnosis takes #9 with 1,369 votes, just 32 ahead of AMFJ at 1,337. Curiously, AMFJ's credit score of 457 actually tops Stereo Hypnosis's 438 — a second case in this ranking where votes and metrics diverge, bookending the Bjarki–Kiasmos split at the top.

Zoom out and the shape of the scene is clear. Techno owns the summit, with three of the top four slots, but it doesn't own the country: deep house claims two top-five positions, and the bottom third belongs to electronica acts operating at a scale where every vote is personal. The gulf between the top three — all above 6,100 votes — and everyone else is the ranking's defining feature. Exos at #4 sits more than 1,200 votes off the podium, and the drop continues steadily from there.

What this vote captures, ultimately, is a scene with two gears: a handful of internationally streamed names fighting a genuinely close race at the top, and a deep local bench keeping the weirder, homegrown end of Icelandic electronic music alive. Fifty-seven votes decided the crown this year. Next year, that podium is anyone's.