Top 10 DJs Worldwide: Armin van Buuren and David Guetta Level at 995

The headline is a tie. Armin van Buuren and David Guetta both sit on a credit score of 995, and the only gap between them is the vote count: 86,057 for Armin, 85,688 for Guetta. Armin holds the top card and a 369-vote edge.

The two come from very different lanes, trance on one side and dance-pop on the other. Their streaming numbers differ accordingly. Guetta has 82,502,263 Spotify monthly listeners and Armin has 15,152,615, yet they finish level. That is the first lesson of this ranking: no single platform decides it.

Charlotte de Witte sits three points back on 992, with 85,330 votes, which makes this a genuinely tight front three. Representing Belgium, she is the highest-ranked techno artist in the field and the only woman in this Top 10.

Her Spotify monthly audience of 1,805,792 is the smallest in the top six. That makes her position the clearest sign that the credit score is not a streaming chart in disguise. Our data also logs a festival count of 202 for her.

After third place the vote totals fall away, from 85,330 to 53,203 for Tiësto in fourth. Tiësto (990) and Martin Garrix (987, 53,013 votes) bring the Netherlands to three entries, more than any other country in the ten.

Both are heavyweights on the platforms. Tiësto draws 33,798,429 Spotify monthly listeners, second only to Guetta here. Garrix holds 15,328,754 Instagram followers alongside 15,200,000 YouTube subscribers. With Tiësto filed under trance and Garrix under mainstage, the Dutch trio splits two-to-one between trance and the mainstage sound.

Anyma rounds out the second tier at 981, with 52,796 votes and 6,758,588 Spotify monthly listeners. Anyma is the first of two United States entries and the first of two melodic house and techno acts.

John Summit and Carl Cox share 978 at seventh and eighth, the countdown's second tie. Summit, the other US entry and the other melodic act, brings 11,747,076 Spotify monthly listeners and 59,792 Resident Advisor followers. Cox is one of two UK entries and the field's second techno act. He has 960,194 monthly listeners, but also 574,197 SoundCloud followers and 259,283 on Mixcloud, platforms built around long-form sets.

Fred again.. sits ninth on 975 with 32,662 votes and 27,997,959 Spotify monthly listeners. That is the third-largest Spotify audience in the ten, placed directly behind a techno act with under a million. It is also the only entry filed under house.

Black Coffee closes the ten at 966 with 32,523 votes. As the countdown's only Afro House artist and only South African entry, he carries a festival count of 371 in our data, plus 5,080,693 Instagram followers.

Three patterns stand out:

- Vote tiers. The top three have 85,330 to 86,057 votes, fourth through sixth have 52,796 to 53,203, and the final four have 32,523 to 33,600. - Close scores. 29 points separate first from tenth, with two outright ties along the way. - Breadth. The ten cover six countries and six genre families, with trance, commercial, techno and melodic each claiming two places.

Rank these ten by Spotify monthly listeners alone and the order would be unrecognisable. Guetta, Tiësto and Fred again.. would lead, while Charlotte de Witte and Carl Cox would sit at the bottom. Instead, a Belgian techno artist stands ahead of the field's second-, third- and fourth-largest Spotify audiences. That gap between streams and standing is the story of this Top 10.