Top 10 DJs Worldwide: Armin van Buuren Leads a Ranking Where Trance Still Rules

The headline number is 938. That's the credit score that puts Armin van Buuren at the summit of our worldwide Top 10, ten points clear of David Guetta at 928. What makes it interesting is *how* he got there — because on raw streaming, this isn't close. Guetta's 87,684,123 Spotify monthly listeners are in a different universe from Armin's 14,613,807. But credit score isn't a streaming chart, and 11,940 voters put the Dutchman first anyway. Trance loyalty, it turns out, still converts.

And trance doesn't stop there. Tiësto lands at #4 on 921, and Paul van Dyk sits fifth on 913 — meaning three of the top five slots belong to a genre the wider industry keeps declaring past its prime. Van Dyk is the clearest case of the credit score seeing past platform metrics: 1,722,752 Spotify monthly listeners is modest company in this field, but 252 festival appearances tell you exactly where his standing is built — in front of crowds, year after year.

Between the trance blocks sits Skrillex at #3 with 923. His profile is the most evenly distributed in the ranking: 22,231,503 Spotify monthly listeners, 6,675,563 SoundCloud followers and 12,083,723 on Instagram, a reminder that the bass world's figurehead commands audiences across every platform rather than dominating just one.

The back half of the table is where this list gets genuinely tight. From Paul van Dyk at 913 down to Martin Garrix at 909, six DJs are separated by just four points. John Summit matches Van Dyk's 913 exactly — a striking pairing of the melodic house wave's current standard-bearer with a trance institution. Carl Cox follows at 912, and his numbers sketch a distinct portrait: 259,283 Mixcloud followers, the largest Mixcloud audience in this Top 10, fitting for a DJ whose currency has always been the mix itself.

James Hype takes #8 on 910, riding tech house's commercial moment with 12,320,890 Spotify monthly listeners and 1,700,000 TikTok followers — platform-native reach that mirrors how his sets travel online. Then comes a dead heat at 909: Boris Brejcha and Martin Garrix, who could hardly be less alike. Brejcha's melodic techno commands a devoted base — 1,690,041 Spotify followers against 1,757,643 monthly listeners, a follower-to-listener ratio that signals people who subscribe rather than sample. Garrix, by contrast, brings big-room scale: 24,718,671 monthly listeners, 15,285,060 Spotify followers and 15,202,056 on Instagram, yet finishes tenth. If anything underlines that this ranking measures something other than reach, it's Garrix's placement.

A few patterns worth naming. The Netherlands places three artists — Van Buuren, Tiësto and Garrix — a national showing no other country matches; Germany and the United States and the United Kingdom land two apiece. Every genre family here is represented by someone at or near career-peak visibility, from commercial dance to underground techno. And the voting was heavy across the board: every entrant drew over 11,000 votes, with Guetta's 11,970 the highest tally of all — more than the winner's 11,940, though not enough to close the score gap.

The takeaway: with only 29 points separating first from tenth, this is less a hierarchy than a cluster of ten different answers to what a great DJ is in 2026. Armin van Buuren's answer — two decades of trance stewardship, consistency, and a voter base that shows up — is, for now, the winning one.