Top 100 DJs of 2013 by Data [Infographic]

By Brandon Cook

Securing a spot as a top DJ in the world means a whole lot more than just having your name on a numbered list. For many years the DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJ poll has been the holy grail for DJ careers. An artist’s fan count, media coverage, music sales, and bookings are all influenced by where their name sits on the list. So much so that campaigning for this is quite normal and previous attempts at stuffing the ballots have been made. After all, it is well worth the incremental monetary value that DJs stand to gain from gaming the system.

This is in no way a slight to DJ Mag’s list, their poll is by far the most widely accepted, far reaching and scalable ranking of DJs and is completely fan driven. However, we thought it may be interesting to look at the popularity of DJs based on metrics that indicate fans behavior outside of polling. We worked with the team at Just Go to pull together the number of fans from Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Soundcloud and determine the fan base of the world’s leading DJs. Using these metrics, along with mentions in from Google with DMCA piracy notices, we determined the top DJs of the world by data.

(Click to expand chart)

Since we were looking specifically at the top DJs of 2013, we created a scale that also factored fan growth in the last calendar year. We used total fans and new fans added last year at a ratio of 2:1 respectively. Although we know that social metrics can sometimes be manipulated, we feel strongly that these metrics are highly illustrative of the overall popularity of these artists in 2013.

One of the most intriguing parts of this study is the amount of overall fan growth in the last year for these leading artists. Watching the rise of EDM has been fascinating and the staggering growth in fan count this year is very descriptive of the rise in interest. With a 34% growth in fans across the all platforms and nearly double that in YouTube and Soundcloud, it is clear that beyond social mentions these fans are thirsty for more.

Brandon Cook is the cofounder of ToppleTrack.com, one of the web’s leading anti-piracy companies. Topple Track works with artists, labels and distributors to protect and monetize digital content.

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