Top 10 DJs Worldwide: Just 30 Votes Separate David Guetta From Armin van Buuren

If you want to know how close this year's poll was, start at the top: David Guetta takes the No. 1 spot with 11,970 fan votes, and Armin van Buuren sits at No. 2 with 11,940. That is a gap of exactly 30 votes — and remarkably, that same 30-vote step repeats all the way down the ballot, from Martin Garrix's 11,910 to Black Coffee's 11,700 at No. 10. The entire Top 10 is separated by just 270 votes. Whatever else this list tells us, it says the electorate is genuinely split.

The Guetta engine keeps running. The French Dance/Pop titan pairs his win with numbers that justify it: 87,684,123 Spotify monthly listeners, 28,205,283 Spotify followers, and a credit score of 928. Curiously, he doesn't hold the highest credit score on the list — that belongs to van Buuren, whose 938 is the best mark in the field. The Dutch trance institution converts a far smaller streaming footprint (14,613,807 monthly listeners) into near-parity at the ballot box, a reminder that trance devotion doesn't need pop-chart scale to mobilize.

The Netherlands owns the middle of the table. Van Buuren, Martin Garrix, and Tiësto stack up at Nos. 2, 3, and 4 — three Dutch names in a row, split between trance and Big Room. Garrix brings 24,718,671 monthly listeners and the largest Instagram following of the Dutch trio at 15,202,056; Tiësto counters with 34,282,125 monthly listeners and a 921 credit score that ranks third overall.

Techno crashes the commercial party. Charlotte de Witte lands at No. 5 with 11,850 votes — the highest-placed woman on the list and the first techno entry, backed by a punishing touring record of 202 festival appearances. Carl Cox holds No. 8, and his profile reads like a map of where techno actually lives: 259,283 Mixcloud followers, the biggest Mixcloud audience in the entire Top 10, alongside a 912 credit score that outranks several artists placed above him.

Calvin Harris, the quiet giant. At No. 6, the UK hitmaker's 80,769,216 Spotify monthly listeners are second only to Guetta's, and his 7,500,061 SoundCloud followers lead the field. That the fan vote places him mid-table while his streaming numbers rival the winner's is one of this year's more interesting tensions — poll voters and playlist listeners are clearly not the same crowd.

Alok is the social-media outlier — in the good sense. Brazil's Big Room export takes No. 7 with the largest Instagram (28,890,588) and TikTok (15,100,000) followings on the entire list, proof that the ballot's center of gravity isn't purely European.

The back stretch belongs to the underground. Australia's Fisher plants tech house at No. 9 with 20,000,000 Spotify monthly listeners, and South Africa's Black Coffee closes the countdown at No. 10 — carrying the flag for Afro house and the heaviest festival résumé in the poll at 371 appearances, more than anyone else here.

Step back and the picture is striking: commercial dance holds four slots, trance two, techno two, and house and Afro house one apiece, with artists from France to Brazil to South Africa. When 270 votes covers the distance from first to tenth, next year's ballot is anyone's to take.