Top 10 Techno DJs: Charlotte de Witte Wins the Fan Vote in a Landslide

Fan-voted rankings rarely look this lopsided at the top and this congested underneath. Our techno Top 10 is really two stories: a runaway leader with a clear second, and then eight names packed inside barely a thousand votes.

A landslide at the summit

Charlotte de Witte takes first place with 85,330 votes, more than two and a half times the total of anyone else on the list. The Belgian's credit score of 992 is also the highest here, and her audience numbers back the vote up across almost every channel: 1,788,852 Spotify monthly listeners, 1,010,000 YouTube subscribers and 6,394,808 Instagram followers, the largest Instagram following in this ten. Her 202 festivals in our count show the reach translates into stage time, not just screen time.

Carl Cox is second with 32,756 votes and a credit score of 978, the only other score above 950 on the list. His profile is more evenly spread than most: 574,197 SoundCloud followers, 259,283 on Mixcloud and 275,624 Last.fm listeners, the second-highest Last.fm figure in the ten. Still, the gap between first and second is 52,574 votes, which tells you how decisively de Witte's fanbase turned out.

The thousand-vote pile-up

From third place down, the margins collapse. Amelie Lens sits third on 14,389 votes and Nina Kraviz closes the list in tenth on 13,331, so the entire bottom eight is contained within 1,058 votes. Four of the gaps are under 90 votes: I Hate Models over Sara Landry by 88, Landry over Adam Beyer by 87, Indira Paganotto over Reinier Zonneveld by 85, and Zonneveld over Kraviz by 86. A handful of late ballots would have reordered the middle of this list.

Lens, the second Belgian in the top three, earns her spot with 1,377,954 Spotify monthly listeners, 2,840,394 Instagram followers and 218 festivals, more than de Witte. Her credit score of 929 is the lowest in the ten, a reminder that fan votes and our score measure different things.

Peggy Gou, fourth with 14,117 votes, is the clearest example of that split. She carries the largest Spotify monthly listener figure on the list at 6,293,326, the most Resident Advisor followers at 133,460 and a credit score of 940, yet the South Korean artist finishes 272 votes behind Lens. Streaming reach and vote turnout are not the same thing.

Festival muscle in the middle

I Hate Models, from France, lands fifth with 13,850 votes and the highest festival count of anyone we hold data for, at 421. The 635,000 YouTube subscribers are the second-highest on the list behind de Witte. Sara Landry follows in sixth with 13,762 votes, 1,234,752 Spotify monthly listeners and 273 festivals, the only entry from the United States.

Adam Beyer, seventh on 13,675, is the quiet overperformer by our own metric. His credit score of 942 is third-highest in the ten, above everyone except de Witte and Cox. Sweden's representative also holds the largest SoundCloud following here at 574,778, narrowly ahead of Cox, while 1,570,773 Spotify monthly listeners place him fourth on that measure.

Spain, the Netherlands and Russia close it out

Indira Paganotto takes eighth with 13,502 votes and 291 festivals, the second-highest count on the list, plus 1,717,153 Instagram followers. Reinier Zonneveld, ninth with 13,417, has the second-largest Spotify monthly audience of the ten at 2,294,145. Nina Kraviz rounds out the list in tenth with 13,331 votes, 67,961 Resident Advisor followers, second only to Gou, and 2,040,860 on Instagram. Those are numbers that would not look out of place several places higher.

What the vote says about techno in 2026

Six of the ten are women, nine countries are represented, and Belgium is the only nation with two entries. The scene this list describes is global and heavily festival-driven: every artist with a festival count in our data has at least 202 bookings.

The number that lingers, though, is the one at the top. Everyone from third to tenth is fighting over inches. Charlotte de Witte is running a different race entirely.