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

The top of DJ Radar's worldwide ranking is a dead heat. Armin van Buuren and David Guetta both hold a credit score of 995, and just 29 points separate No. 1 from No. 10. Small margins decide this list.

Armin van Buuren takes the top line and also edges the vote count, 86,057 to 85,688. That is a gap of 369 votes between the Dutch trance name and France's Dance / Pop heavyweight.

The two profiles could hardly look more different. Guetta has the biggest streaming footprint in the ten: 82,041,818 Spotify monthly listeners and 27,900,000 YouTube subscribers. Armin's 15,203,152 monthly listeners are a fraction of that, yet the credit scores are identical. Streaming reach is clearly not the whole equation here.

The clearest pattern in the data is that vote counts fall in exact step with the ranking, from 86,057 at No. 1 down to 32,523 at No. 10. They also break into three distinct tiers.

Armin, Guetta and Charlotte de Witte all clear 85,000 votes. De Witte sits on 85,330 votes and a 992 credit score, three points off the top.

Then the floor drops. Tiësto (53,203), Martin Garrix (53,013) and Anyma (52,796) form a second band, more than 32,000 votes behind De Witte. The final four, John Summit, Carl Cox, Fred again.. and Black Coffee, sit between 32,523 and 33,600.

De Witte is the sharpest sign that this ranking is not a streaming chart. Her 1,784,407 Spotify monthly listeners trail Tiësto's 33,937,605 and Garrix's 22,286,411 by a wide distance, but the Belgian techno name out-polled both by more than 32,000 votes. She is also the only woman in this top ten.

The Netherlands holds three of the top five places: Armin at No. 1, Tiësto at No. 4 on 990, and Garrix, filed under Mainstage, at No. 5 on 987. The whole top five fits inside eight points.

The next step down is six points, to Anyma on 981. Anyma and John Summit, at No. 7 on 978, are the two United States entries and the two Melodic House & Techno names in the ten.

Carl Cox shares that 978 with Summit, and the shape of the numbers is unlike anyone else's. Cox has the lowest Spotify monthly listener figure in the ten, 931,597, yet his 259,283 Mixcloud followers are the most among the four artists here with Mixcloud data. On this evidence, the audience follows the long-form mix more than the streaming playlist.

Fred again.. lands at No. 9 on 975. That comes with 27,085,837 Spotify monthly listeners, the third-highest in the ten, and the list's largest Resident Advisor following at 162,106. The UK house entry reaches both the streaming crowd and the club-facing one.

Black Coffee closes the ten on 966, nine points behind Fred again.., which is the widest gap between any two neighbours in the countdown. Black Coffee is the only Afro House artist here and the only entry from outside Europe and the United States. The profile shows 5,080,693 Instagram followers, slightly ahead of Armin's 5,033,425, and a festival count of 371 on file.

Six genre families fill ten slots, and none takes more than two. Trance, commercial, techno and melodic claim two each; house and Afro House have one apiece. With two ties, a top five inside eight points and a vote column that mirrors the order exactly, there is very little room at the top of this list.