Top 10 DJs Worldwide: Armin van Buuren Holds Off David Guetta by 369 Votes

DJ Radar's worldwide fan vote is really three separate races stacked on top of each other, with wide gaps between them. The vote totals show this more clearly than the rank numbers do.

Armin van Buuren takes #1 with 86,057 votes. David Guetta is 369 votes behind on 85,688, and Charlotte de Witte is another 358 back on 85,330. Only 727 votes separate first from third.

The three leaders have very little in common musically. Van Buuren is listed under Trance, Guetta under Dance / Pop and de Witte under Techno. That is three genre families from three countries: the Netherlands, France and Belgium.

Streaming reach clearly doesn't decide this vote. Guetta has the largest Spotify audience in the ten, with 82,926,860 monthly listeners and 28,648,823 followers, and van Buuren still edges ahead on votes. De Witte reaches #3 with 1,788,852 monthly listeners, the second-smallest Spotify monthly figure in the field. De Witte is also the only act in the ten listed as female, and the highest-placed techno name.

After the top three, the totals drop sharply. Tiësto opens the second tier at #4 with 53,203 votes, which is 32,127 fewer than de Witte. That is the widest gap in the ranking.

Tiësto, Martin Garrix (53,013) and Anyma (52,796) are separated by just 407 votes. Garrix has the biggest Instagram following of anyone here, at 15,307,368, and still finishes 190 votes behind Tiësto. Anyma is listed under Melodic House & Techno and is the highest-ranked United States entry. Anyma trails Garrix by 217.

This tier puts three different sounds within a few hundred votes of each other: Tiësto's Trance, Garrix's Mainstage and Anyma's melodic sound.

Anyma is another 19,196 votes clear of John Summit at #7. From #7 to #10, four acts are packed into 1,077 votes.

Summit leads that group on 33,600, ahead of Carl Cox on 32,756. Below Cox it gets even closer. Fred again.. is 94 votes back on 32,662, and Black Coffee is another 139 behind on 32,523. Only 233 votes separate #8 from #10.

The gap between streams and votes shows up here too. Fred again.. has 28,173,892 Spotify monthly listeners. Cox has 982,321, the lowest figure in the ten, and still finishes one place higher. A fan vote measures a different kind of commitment than a play count does.

Black Coffee closes out the ten. Black Coffee is listed under Afro House and is the only South Africa entry. Black Coffee also has a festival count of 371 on file. Only one other act here has that figure recorded: de Witte, with 202.

Three of the ten are listed under the Netherlands: van Buuren, Tiësto and Garrix. No other country has more. The United States and the United Kingdom each have two entries, and France, Belgium and South Africa have one each.

Six genre families are represented. Trance, commercial, techno and melodic each take two places. House and Afro House take one each, through Fred again.. and Black Coffee.

DJ Radar's credit scores run from 996 at #1 to 966 at #10, in the same order as the votes.

The headline is van Buuren's 369-vote edge over Guetta. The bigger story is the structure: three tight tiers, separated by gaps of 32,127 and 19,196 votes. For the bottom four, a few hundred votes is the difference between #7 and #10. For anyone in the middle tier hoping to reach the top three, the climb is more than 32,000 votes.