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

The top of the DJ Radar credit-score ranking is close to a dead heat. Armin van Buuren and David Guetta are tied on 995. On votes, van Buuren is ahead with 86,057 to Guetta's 85,688, which leaves 369 votes between trance and dance-pop at the very top.

Guetta has the most platform reach in this group. Among these ten he leads on Spotify monthly listeners (81,957,019), YouTube subscribers (27.9 million) and TikTok followers (7 million). That reach still doesn't get him first place outright, and that tells you something about how this table works.

Charlotte de Witte is three points back on 992, with 85,330 votes. That puts her 727 behind the leader. She is the only woman in the ten and the highest-placed techno artist. She gets there with 1,755,352 Spotify monthly listeners, the second-lowest figure in this group. Streaming volume plainly isn't what decides these positions.

Line up the vote counts and the ranking falls into three clean bands. All of the top three are above 85,000. Then the votes drop sharply. Tiësto, fourth on 990, has 53,203 votes, which is 32,127 fewer than de Witte, yet his credit score is only two points lower. Tiësto, Martin Garrix (987, 53,013 votes) and Anyma (981, 52,796) make up a second band that is just 407 votes wide. The third band runs from John Summit's 33,600 down to Black Coffee's 32,523, a spread of 1,077 votes across four names.

Vote counts fall in exactly the same order as the ranking, every step from first to tenth. The scores are much more bunched than the votes, though. The whole ten covers just 29 points, from 995 down to 966.

The Netherlands has three of the ten: van Buuren at the top, Tiësto fourth and Garrix fifth. That's two trance names and one big-room act, and they carry some of the largest followings here. Tiësto's 34,038,383 Spotify monthly listeners are second only to Guetta in this group. Garrix leads the ten on Instagram with 15,323,936 followers.

Anyma and John Summit are both listed under the United States and both filed under Melodic House & Techno. They sit next to each other in sixth and seventh. Only three points separate them, 981 to 978, but they land on opposite sides of the vote drop, 19,196 apart.

Carl Cox is the clearest example. At eighth on 977, Cox has the smallest Spotify monthly audience in the ten at 954,638. He still finishes ahead of Fred again.., whose 26,933,258 monthly listeners are the third-highest in this group. Both are listed under the United Kingdom, and two points and 94 votes separate them.

Black Coffee is listed under South Africa and is the only Afro House artist in the ten. He takes tenth on 966. The nine-point drop from Fred again.. on 975 is the widest gap between any two neighbours in the ranking. Black Coffee is also one of only two artists here with a festival count on record: 371, against de Witte's 202.

No genre family has more than two seats. Trance, commercial, techno and melodic have two each, and house and Afro house have one apiece. Six countries are represented. No single sound dominates this list.

The real contest is at the top. A shared 995 and a 369-vote margin leave first place wide open, and de Witte is three points from making it a three-way tie.