Top 10 DJs in New Zealand: Sammy Virji Leads as Bass Music Takes Half the List

New Zealand's fans have voted, and the result is clear at the top and tightly packed below it. Sammy Virji leads this Top 10 with 7,634 votes. The other nine are spread across a little under 2,000 votes, and five of them come from bass music.

Sammy Virji's win isn't close. The Tech House artist leads second place by 622 votes and also has the highest credit score on the list at 861. The platform numbers point the same way: 4,907,001 Spotify monthly listeners, 553,121 Instagram followers and 321,085 Last.fm listeners. Fan votes, streaming and social reach all agree here.

Brooks comes second with 7,012 votes. As the only Dance / Pop act in the ten, Brooks brings a commercial sound to the list, backed by 1,116,296 Spotify monthly listeners and 323,915 Spotify followers. Below Brooks there's a gap of 979 votes to third place, the biggest drop anywhere in the countdown.

From third place down, bass music takes over. The Upbeats (Drum & Bass, 6,033 votes) and Mt Eden (Dubstep, 6,012 votes) are just 21 votes apart, the closest result in the Top 10. On credit score, The Upbeats actually beat Brooks, 809 to 800. Fans and the wider metrics don't always agree on order.

Drum & bass in particular is everywhere. State of Mind (5,637 votes), Tokyo Prose (5,469) and Bulletproof (5,430) join The Upbeats to give the genre four places. Add Mt Eden's dubstep and the bass family holds half the list. Tokyo Prose and Bulletproof finish 39 votes apart, the second-closest race on the board.

The Last.fm numbers back up how loyal this audience is. State of Mind (131,729) and The Upbeats (128,284) both have six-figure Last.fm listener counts, level with Brooks at 129,500, even though both have far fewer Spotify monthly listeners.

The rest of the list is more varied. P-Money is fifth with 5,920 votes, joining Sammy Virji as the second house act in the ten. P-Money's 273,863 Spotify monthly listeners are the third-highest total here, behind only the top two.

Grouch is sixth with 5,758 votes and is the only Psy-Trance act on the list. With 57,200 Spotify monthly listeners, Grouch ranks above several acts with bigger streaming numbers, which suggests a dedicated core of fans who turn out to vote.

Stray Theories finishes tenth with 5,189 votes and is the only techno act in the Top 10. Stray Theories has the smallest Spotify monthly audience on the list at 6,058 listeners but still made the cut. That gap between streams and votes shows what a fan-voted ranking measures: how committed listeners are, not just how many there are.

The spread from first to tenth is 2,445 votes. Take out the top two and the middle of the table is very close: no gap from fourth place down is bigger than 241 votes. New Zealand's list has one global-scale leader and a commercial runner-up, then a deep group of bass acts, with house, psytrance and techno making up the rest.

If you're following the scene, the battles to watch are lower down. The Upbeats and Mt Eden are separated by a few dozen votes, and so are Tokyo Prose and Bulletproof. Small swings in fan support could reorder the middle of this list quickly.