Who Rules Techno Now: Charlotte de Witte Leads, and 9 Points Split the Chasing Pack

Techno's top tier on DJ Radar splits into two stories. Two front-runners have clear space between themselves and the field. Behind them, the chasing pack is so close that every point counts.

Out of 1,801 DJs on the board, these are the leaders, and their numbers show where the genre's power sits right now.

Charlotte de Witte (Belgium) holds No. 1 with a credit score of 992 on 85,330 votes. De Witte's reach is spread across many platforms: 6,428,539 Instagram followers, 1,010,000 YouTube subscribers, 1,800,000 on TikTok and 1,784,407 Spotify monthly listeners. De Witte also has the most Spotify followers of the eight, at 1,471,950, and logs 202 festivals.

Carl Cox (United Kingdom) is second on 977, 15 points back, with 32,756 votes. Compared with de Witte, Cox's strongest showings come on club-facing platforms: 574,197 SoundCloud followers, 259,283 on Mixcloud and 275,624 Last.fm listeners, plus 2,794,516 on Instagram.

Below Cox, the board drops 36 points to Adam Beyer at 941. From there, ranks three through eight span just 9 points, and no two neighbours are more than 3 points apart.

- Adam Beyer (Sweden), 941: the largest SoundCloud following of the eight at 574,778, just 581 ahead of Cox, plus 247 festivals. - Peggy Gou (South Korea), 938: 6,016,679 Spotify monthly listeners, 851,181 Last.fm listeners and 133,460 RA followers. Each of these is the highest of the eight. - I Hate Models (France), 938: level with Gou on score, with 636,000 YouTube subscribers and 421 festivals. That is the highest festival count among the leaders who have one recorded. - Sara Landry (United States), 936: 1,495,723 Spotify monthly listeners, 1,515,870 Instagram followers and 273 festivals. - Reinier Zonneveld (Netherlands), 934: 13,417 votes, 144,002 SoundCloud followers and 29,417 RA followers. - Indira Paganotto (Spain), 932: 1,716,248 Instagram followers, fourth among the eight, and 291 festivals.

DJ Radar doesn't measure kick drums or tempo. It shows who leads techno right now, and five patterns stand out.

It's international. Eight leaders, eight countries: Belgium, the United Kingdom, Sweden, South Korea, France, the United States, the Netherlands and Spain. No country holds more than one place in the top eight.

It's evenly split. The board lists four women and four men among the leaders. Women hold No. 1, No. 4, No. 6 and No. 8.

The pack is level on votes too. Outside the top two, every leader has between 13,417 and 14,117 votes, a 700-vote band. Votes alone don't set the order. Beyer ranks third on 13,675 votes, while Gou has 14,117 and sits fourth, so the credit score is not a straight vote count.

Reach comes in two currencies. Club-facing platforms and mainstream platforms crown different leaders. Beyer and Cox top SoundCloud. Gou leads on Spotify monthly listeners, Last.fm and RA. De Witte leads on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Spotify followers. No one leads everywhere.

Festival volume and rank don't line up. Five of the eight have festival counts recorded, ranging from 202 for de Witte to 421 for I Hate Models, with Paganotto second on 291. The No. 1 has the lowest count of those five.

De Witte and Cox are clear of the field. The real contest is the 9-point block below them. With a tied score at No. 4 and No. 5 and 2-point gaps from No. 5 down to No. 8, it is the part of the board worth watching.