Top 10 Psytrance DJs: Israel's Grip and the Global Chase

Psytrance has always been a scene of true believers, and this Top 10 — ranked by credit score — reads like a map of where the faith runs deepest. The headline is impossible to miss: Israel owns the summit. Three of the top three acts, and four of the ten overall, come from the country that turned Goa's blueprint into a global export.

Vini Vici sit alone at the top. Their 871 credit score is the highest here by a wide margin, and the vote count tells you why: 10,470 ballots, the only act in this field to clear five figures. Add 3,223,675 Spotify monthly listeners — again, the largest in the top ten — and you have a duo whose mainstage reach simply outstrips everyone around them. This isn't a narrow win. It's a gap.

Below them, the margins tighten dramatically. Infected Mushroom (834) and Astrix (830) are separated by four points, and both wear their veteran status on their sleeves. Infected Mushroom carry the deepest festival résumé in the ten with 57 appearances logged, plus a genre-leading 820,735 Spotify followers. Astrix answer with 7,893 votes — the second-highest tally in the countdown — 47 festivals, and a broad social footprint spanning nearly 600,000 Instagram followers and 481,389 on SoundCloud. These are the pillars the modern scene was built on, and the numbers reflect careers measured in decades, not seasons.

The middle of the table is where the story gets more international. Protoculture (826) is the highest-placed act from outside Israel, the South African carrying a two-decade catalogue that bridges trance and psytrance — a reminder that credit score rewards more than one kind of audience. Liquid Soul (819), flying Switzerland's flag, backs up his placing with 45 festivals and over half a million monthly listeners.

From there the field compresses into a photo finish. Simon Patterson (804) brings a trance-crossover pedigree and a scene-leading 19,205 Mixcloud followers, evidence of a DJ whose sets travel through the mixtape underground. Bliss (803) is the outlier's outlier — the Danish act leans on 410,300 TikTok followers, comfortably the largest short-form audience in the countdown, a signal of where a younger psytrance listenership is being minted.

The closing stretch is a genuine dead heat. Ghost Rider and Neelix are locked at 800 apiece, with Ghost Rider edging ahead on votes — 6,816 to 6,619 — to claim eighth. Ghost Rider returns Israel to the board at number eight; Neelix flies Germany's flag at nine and, notably, posts 785,792 Spotify monthly listeners, one of the highest streaming figures in the entire ten. That a DJ with that kind of streaming pull sits ninth says everything about how deep this field runs.

Rounding out the countdown, Sweden's E-Type (792) closes the list with a reach built well beyond the psytrance core, yet still lands inside the genre's elite ten.

What this ranking ultimately shows is a scene with a clear center of gravity and a widening perimeter. Israel still sets the standard at the top, but the credit scores from four to ten are separated by just 34 points — proof that the chase behind Vini Vici is closer, and more global, than ever.