Trance's Top Eight: Armin van Buuren Leads a 742-DJ Field on DJ Radar

Trance remains one of electronic music's most fiercely contested territories on DJ Radar, where 742 DJs currently sit under the genre-family banner. At the very top, the pecking order is both familiar and closely fought.

Armin van Buuren holds rank 1 with a credit score of 938 and 11,940 votes — the highest vote tally in the field. Behind him, Tiësto sits at 921 (11,880 votes), and Paul van Dyk at 912 (11,040 votes). The compression is real: the first five names land within 39 points of one another, from Armin's 938 down to Marlon Hoffstadt's 899 at rank 5.

Nowhere is that closeness sharper than the border between rank 4 and rank 5. Above & Beyond (904) and Marlon Hoffstadt (899) are separated by just 5 points on credit score — and, notably, Hoffstadt actually out-polls them on raw votes, 10,950 to 10,620. Voting enthusiasm and Radar's credit score don't always move in lockstep.

Geography tells its own story. The top eight cluster tightly around two countries. The Netherlands claims three — Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, and Ferry Corsten (rank 6, 878). Germany matches that with three — Paul van Dyk, Marlon Hoffstadt, and Markus Schulz (rank 8, 854). The United Kingdom supplies the other two: Above & Beyond and Paul Oakenfold (rank 7, 868). Between them, these two nations account for six of the eight leaders.

One figure stands apart from the streaming and social tallies: Paul van Dyk carries a festival count of 252, the only leader with that stat recorded — a marker of stage mileage that follower counts don't capture.

Audience reach varies widely across platforms. Tiësto posts the largest Spotify monthly-listener figure among the leaders at 34,282,125, alongside 8,373,330 Spotify followers and 7,800,578 on Instagram. Armin van Buuren follows with 14,613,807 Spotify monthly listeners and 4,938,795 Instagram followers. Further down the board the numbers thin — Markus Schulz sits at 484,015 Spotify monthly listeners at rank 8 — but it's credit score, not raw audience, that orders this list.

The takeaway for trance in 2026: the establishment still holds the crown, but the margins at the top are narrow. Armin leads on both score and votes, yet a 39-point band separates the top five, and the vote counts scramble the neat top-down order. This is a genre with a settled aristocracy and an unsettled hierarchy — exactly the kind of tension that keeps a 742-name leaderboard worth watching.