Despite shuttered clubs and festivals, dance music fans continue to support their favourite artists. Top 100 DJs Virtual Festivals, in aid of Unicef receive 3.8m views so far. Dedicated China Voting Portal rolled out for the first time.
there is just one week remaining to vote for your favourite DJs in Top 100 DJs 2020. Voting closes on 23rd September at 23:59 BST. In unprecedented times for the electronic music industry and the fans who drive the landscape, voters have stayed resolute in supporting their favourite DJs and electronic music artists. 612,000 verified votes have been recorded so far, all but equalling the previous record set in 2019.
Although selected venues and festivals across the planet are beginning to open their doors, the vast majority remain closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. In this period DJing and electronic music performance has moved online. To reflect this change, DJ Mag have been running a series of weekly Top 100 DJs Virtual Festivals to give dance music fans the opportunity to experience their favourite DJs and artists in a whole new way ahead of casting their votes.
The Top 100 DJs Virtual Festival series, which continues every Saturday and Sunday until 20th September, is being broadcast across DJ Mag’s global YouTube, Facebook and Twitch channels. Saturdays are dedicated to Top 100 DJs, with Sundays celebrating the Alternative Top 100 DJs. (The Alternative Top 100 DJs, uses the same vote data as the Top 100 DJs poll, cross-referenced with Beatport sales data and a genre-filter to create a ranking to celebrate the contribution of house and techno DJs).
Highlights from Saturday’s Top 100 DJs Virtual Festivals include include David Guetta, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Armin Van Buuren, Don Diablo, MATTN, Ferry Corsten, R3hab, Oliver Heldens, Claptone, W&W, Fedde Le Grand, KSHMR, Paul van Dyk, Steve Aoki, Mariana Bo, and Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano.
Meanwhile, Sundays Alternative Top 100 DJs Virtual Festivals feature a mix of legends, underground stars and rising talent. DJs who have played or are set to play include: Carl Cox, Nastia, Monika Kruse, Kevin Saunderson, Lauren Flax, Satoshi Tomiie, Marco Bailey, David Morales, Rebekah, DJ Spen, Kim Ann Foxman, Rebuke, Dennis Ferrer, David Penn, Fatima Hajji, DJ Pierre, Stacey Pullen, Nicole Moudaber, DJ Paulette and Robert Hood.
Top 100 DJs Virtual Festival lineups are announced weekly on DJ Mag’s Facebook Page.
For the fourth consecutive year, Top 100 DJs is in aid of Unicef. To date Top 100 DJs has raised more than £70,000 for the organisation. With this money, Unicef has been able to provide enough life saving vaccines to protect 815,175 children worldwide. This year the charitable focus shifts towards responding to the Coronavirus Pandemic, as the poll will directly support Unicef’s emergency response fund. Viewers of the Top 100 DJs Virtual Festival live streams and voters have so far contributed more than £5,000 to the campaign, with more activations planned during the results announcement.
In a demonstration of the global reach of the Top 100 DJs poll – and dance music in general – votes have so far been counted from 217 different countries including unlikely dance music markets such as Vatican City!
One of the major markets for Top 100 DJs over the last 5 years has been China. As electronic music culture has exploded in the country’s major cities, DJ Mag has seen a huge increase in votes from the world’s largest country. One of the challenges has been providing a reliable voting platform to keep up with demand from Chinese users, who are not able to navigate the web in the same way as other parts of the world. In 2015, DJ Mag offered global translations to the voting website and in 2017 an SMS login option, for users unable to register with Facebook or Google (such as China-based users), was included. Now in 2020 DJ Mag can announce a dedicated China voting platform – djmagvote.cn – to provide a smooth and efficient way for Chinese electronic music fans to support their favourite DJs.
It is now a decade since the Top 100 DJs Awards Ceremony relocated from London to Amsterdam – originally in a successful partnership with ALDA and latterly (AMF) – which has allowed up to 40,000 people to witness the crowning of The World’s No.1 DJ on the main stage each year. Due to the challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic and to ensure the safety of AMF fans, staff and guests, AMF organisers ALDA and Insomniac announced that the AMF experience in 2020 will have one key difference to previous years – ravers will not unite in the Johan Cruijff ArenA. Instead, AMF are establishing a unique way of coming together, adapting the much-loved format to the world around us. They would like to assure fans that everything else they love about AMF will remain in this new format and more details will be announced in the coming weeks.
New for 2020, Top 100 DJs announced an official partnership with VirtualDJ. With more than a hundred million downloads, VirtualDJ is by far the most-used DJ software on the market, and has a recognized history of technical innovations that have shaped digital DJing for the past 20 years. This year, VirtualDJ is the talk of the industry for introducing a game-changing technology, real-time stem separation, in their DJ software. This new technology is opening a new frontier for DJing that will deeply impact how DJs can mix in the years to come, and felt like the natural companion this year to the world’s leading DJ poll. VirtualDJ will be visible across the voting process and social media results reveal, and DJ Mag will be producing exclusive video content to be released in the coming weeks.
Top 100 DJs is a fully open poll, with no nominations or categories. Voters are simply asked to choose their top 5 DJs. They can include a DJ with 5 followers to a DJ with 5 million followers – but voters are reminded that they only get one vote each year! The 100 DJs with the most votes make the final ranking.
Top 100 DJs was born from the 100th edition of DJ Magazine back in 1993 and began as an editorially curated list. In later years it was opened to a postal ballot before going online. In 2019 more than 1.3 million votes were cast from 179 different countries, cementing Top 100 DJs position as the world’s biggest publicly voted music poll.
Last year, Belgium brothers Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike took the No.1 spot, de-throning Martin Garrix after 3 successive No.1 placings. David Guetta was third while Armin van Buuren was fourth. Check out the full ranking at djmag.com/top100djs
Top 100 DJs Voting continues until 23rd September at top100djs.com
