Top 3 DJs Worldwide: Armin van Buuren Edges Out Guetta and Skrillex in a 15-Point Race

Fifteen points. That's the entire distance between first and third in this edition of the worldwide rankings — a spread so narrow that any of these three names could plausibly sit on top next time the votes settle. But for now, the summit belongs to trance.

The Dutch trance institution takes the top spot with a credit score of 938, built on 11,940 votes. What's striking is that he does it without the biggest raw numbers on the board. His 14,613,807 Spotify monthly listeners and 4,938,795 Instagram followers are strong, but they're not the largest figures among these three — not close. Where van Buuren separates himself is depth across the DJ-native platforms: 1,187,795 SoundCloud followers, 99,646 on Mixcloud (the largest Mixcloud following of the trio by a wide margin), and 1,738,312 Last.fm listeners. It's the profile of an artist whose audience is anchored in mix culture itself, not just streaming playlists — and the voting reflects it.

Here's the tension at the heart of this ranking. David Guetta's platform numbers tower over the field: 87,684,123 Spotify monthly listeners, 28,205,283 Spotify followers, 12,253,645 on Instagram, 6.9 million on TikTok, and 152,250 followers on Resident Advisor — the highest RA count of the three. He also drew the most votes of anyone here, at 11,970. And yet his credit score lands at 928, ten points shy of the top. The Dance / Pop crossover formula has made the Frenchman arguably the most-streamed DJ alive, but in a ranking where the score is the final word, sheer audience scale hasn't been enough to close that last gap. Second place, for an artist operating at this altitude, will read as unfinished business.

At 923, Skrillex completes the podium and gives the United States — and bass music — its representative in the top three. His 11,460 votes are the fewest of the trio, but the profile behind them is formidable: 22,231,503 Spotify monthly listeners, 12,083,723 Instagram followers, 2.46 million YouTube subscribers, and a massive 6,675,563 SoundCloud following — the largest SoundCloud audience among these three, fitting for an artist whose sound was forged in that platform's upload culture. Five points behind Guetta, he's the closest chaser on the board.

What makes this top three worth reading twice is its spread of styles. Trance, commercial dance-pop, and bass/club music each claim a step of the podium — three genre families, three countries, three very different routes to the top. Van Buuren's lead rests on consistency across the platforms where DJ culture actually lives. Guetta's case rests on reach that no one else here can match. Skrillex's rests on a fanbase that has followed him from SoundCloud uploads to global festival headline slots.

With the scores sitting at 938, 928, and 923, none of these positions are safe. The vote counts — all within a few hundred of each other — suggest an electorate that is engaged and evenly distributed across all three camps. If the next cycle shifts even slightly, this podium reshuffles. For now, though, the flag flying at the top is Dutch, and it's orange.