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

At the top of DJ Radar's worldwide credit-score ranking, there is nothing between the two leaders on score. Armin van Buuren and David Guetta both sit on 995, the highest mark in the field. The vote count barely splits them either: 86,057 for Armin, 85,688 for Guetta. That is a gap of 369 votes out of more than 85,000 each, which makes it a genuinely tight race.

The two leaders get to 995 in very different ways. Guetta is the Dance / Pop representative from France and has the biggest streaming footprint in the ten, with 81,957,019 Spotify monthly listeners and 27,900,000 YouTube subscribers.

Armin flies the trance flag for the Netherlands with 15,158,683 monthly listeners. That is a fraction of Guetta's reach, yet he matches Guetta point for point on credit score. It's the clearest sign of how this ranking works: audience size counts, but it doesn't decide everything.

Three points back, Belgium's Charlotte de Witte holds third on 992 with 85,330 votes. That leaves the techno standard-bearer within a few hundred votes of both leaders. Her 1,755,352 Spotify monthly listeners are the second-lowest in the top ten, which says a lot about the support behind her score.

Those three make up a tier of their own. All of them clear 85,000 votes. Nobody else comes close.

The next three places sit in a narrow vote band of 52,796 to 53,203. Tiësto leads it on 990, and Martin Garrix follows on 987. That puts three Dutch names in the top five.

Tiësto is listed under trance alongside Armin. His 34,038,383 Spotify monthly listeners are second only to Guetta's. Garrix brings the Big Room sound, with 15,422,633 Spotify followers and 15,323,936 on Instagram.

Anyma rounds out the band at 981 with 52,796 votes. That brings Melodic House & Techno, and the United States, into the top six.

The last four places sit even closer on votes, all between 32,523 and 33,600. John Summit leads them on 978 with 33,600 votes. He is the second Melodic House & Techno act and the second from the United States.

One point behind is Carl Cox on 977, the list's second techno name and the first of two from the United Kingdom. He has 954,638 Spotify monthly listeners, the lowest figure among the ten. Even so, he lands at #8, another reminder that streaming totals don't set the order.

Fred again.. works the other way. The House entry from the United Kingdom has 26,933,258 Spotify monthly listeners, the third-highest in the list, yet sits ninth on 975.

Black Coffee closes the countdown on 966 with 32,523 votes, carrying Afro House and South Africa into the top ten. The nine-point step down from Fred again.. is the biggest single gap anywhere in the ranking. Black Coffee still brings a solid platform base, including 5,087,844 Instagram followers.

From first to tenth, the spread is 29 points, and the top nine fit within 20. No genre family has more than two entries: trance, commercial, techno and melodic each have two, while house and Afro House have one each.

The map is just as spread out. The Netherlands has three entries, the United States and the United Kingdom have two each, and France, Belgium and South Africa have one apiece. On these numbers, the global top ten doesn't belong to any one sound. The real fight is over a few hundred votes at the very top.