Top 10 DJs Worldwide: Armin van Buuren and David Guetta Share 995 at the Summit

Armin van Buuren and David Guetta share the top credit score in this ranking: 995 apiece. Armin holds the No. 1 line and also has the bigger vote count, 86,057 to Guetta's 85,688, a margin of 369 votes.

Charlotte de Witte is barely off that pace on 992, with 85,330 votes. Three credit points and 727 votes cover the entire top three, so this is a genuinely tight race at the top. The podium also spans three styles and three countries: trance from the Netherlands, dance-pop from France and techno from Belgium.

The vote column explains the shape of the list better than anything else. The ten are ordered by votes exactly, top to bottom, and the totals fall into three distinct bands. The top three all clear 85,000. Tiësto, Martin Garrix and Anyma sit between 52,796 and 53,203. John Summit, Carl Cox, Fred again.. and Black Coffee land between 32,523 and 33,600.

Credit score moves far more gently. Charlotte de Witte and Tiësto are just two points apart, 992 to 990, despite a vote gap of more than 32,000. Whatever feeds the credit score, it is not a raw head count.

It isn't a streaming leaderboard either. Guetta's 82,041,818 Spotify monthly listeners are the highest in the ten, yet they earn only a share of the top score. Tiësto (33,937,605), Fred again.. (27,085,837) and Martin Garrix (22,286,411) all draw more monthly listeners than Armin's 15,203,152, and all three rank behind Armin.

At the other extreme, Carl Cox posts the lowest Spotify monthly figure here, 931,597, and still sits a single point behind John Summit, 977 to 978.

The Netherlands is the only country with three entries, and all three are in the top five: Armin at No. 1, Tiësto at No. 4 and Martin Garrix at No. 5. Armin and Tiësto are both listed under trance, which gives the genre two of the top four places.

The United States comes in at No. 6 and No. 7 with Anyma (981) and John Summit (978), both filed under Melodic House & Techno. Melodic is the only genre family here with back-to-back entries, though the pair sit in different vote bands: Anyma has 52,796 votes and John Summit has 33,600.

Techno has two seats at opposite ends of the order: Charlotte de Witte at No. 3 and Carl Cox at No. 8. De Witte is also the only woman in the ten.

The United Kingdom supplies Carl Cox and, one place behind, Fred again.. on 975, the only DJ here whose main genre is listed simply as House. South Africa's Black Coffee closes the ten on 966 as its only Afro House representative. The nine-point drop from No. 9 to No. 10 is the widest gap between any two neighbours in the ranking.

Festival counts are logged for only two of the ten, 202 for de Witte and 371 for Black Coffee, so they say little about the field as a whole.

From 995 down to 966, the ten span 29 credit points, six countries and six genre families, and no style holds more than two places. The headline is the tie at the top. Below it, the story is how evenly the scene's major sounds are spread through the rest of the list.