DJ Top 100 Poll Heats Up

The latest instalment in the ongoing saga of DJ magazine’s annual Top 100 DJs list comes via anonymous blogger EDM Snob.

The mysterious blog purportedly reveals “secret payments” from management companies representing artists including Ferry Corsten, Paul Van Dyk and Erick Morillo. The implication is that these payments prove that artists purchased positive editorial coverage, effectively ensuring higher placements in the magazine’s annual Top 100 DJs poll. DJ Mag refutes the claims, arguing that the payments were for “legitimate advertising and CD covermount deals”.

All of which amounts to very little more than a nice bit of free publicity for the nauseatingly named EDM Snob and, by extension, the DJ Mag poll itself.

The row is just the latest in a long line of stories concerning subterfuge and scandal in the poll. Over the last few weeks, the magazine has reported that DJs are being “evicted” from the poll for cheating and that a scam in which votes were apparently sold via eBay has been foiled.

Aside from the fact that it would be naive to believe that any print magazine’s editorial content is completely impartial and uninfluenced by ad sales, it’s unlikely that positive coverage in the magazine would necessarily equate to success in the poll. Even if readers were easily swayed by editorial coverage, the number of people voting in the poll massively exceeds the magazine’s readership. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if a significant proportion of voters had never even picked up a copy of the magazine.

All the fuss about the Top 100 is becoming rather tiresome. Arguments about cheating, campaigning for votes and, inevitably, the final results have become more newsworthy than the poll itself. What began 15 years ago as a light-hearted annual feature has grown into a monstrous popularity contest. Do the results really reflect which DJs are best, whatever that means? No. They probably never really did. But these stories only really serve to turn the whole affair into a soap opera. Can that really be a good thing for the credibility of the dance music scene?