This was definitely an emotional weekend for electronic music fans. After the usual suspense and bets about the winners, DJ Mag revealed not only the winner of the 2020 Top 100 DJs Poll but also of the alternative ranking. After crowning David Guetta as this year’s #1 DJ, they revealed that Charlotte de Witte has taken the first spot in the Alternative Top 100 DJs. The victory of the promising Belgian techno star is an important milestone for her career, for DJingas a female star and for the reputation of that music genre.
DJ Mag’s Alternative Top 100 DJs, powered by Beatport, is an annual ranking addressed to the biggest house and techno artists. The poll is the result of the cross-referencing between the votes in the Top 100 DJs poll and Beatport’s sales data, on those genres.
Charlotte de Witte dethrones the king Carl Cox who has been acclaimed as the winner since the inception of this poll, in 2018. Furthermore, she becomes the first female artist to win a DJ Mag poll, following in the footsteps of Smokin’ Jo, that won the title back in 1992, when the DJ Mag Top 100 was still in-house voting. Compared to the main DJ Mag Top 100 with 12 women, the Top 100 alternative showcases 21 amazing female artists with five of them in the top 10 alone: Nora En Pure, Peggy Gou, Nina Kraviz, Amelie Lens, and Charlotte de Witte.
Charlotte said that ‘It’s probably the strangest year to become No.1 DJ since no one has really been DJing, but yeah, it does mean a lot. It’s a big, big, big milestone.’
The Belgian artist was caught speechless with her two incredible positions in both DJ Mag’s polls. Charlotte de Witte got voted as Highest Techno and Highest Climber, a title she deserved for climbing 42 positions in the original Top 100 DJs poll this year. In 2019 she made her debut as number 76 and this year she moved up to the 34th position. All of this is the reflection of her work over the past five years. Charlotte created her own label in 2019, KNTXT, which has received very high-quality works, not only from herself but also from handpicked artists. In addition to the brilliance she makes behind the decks, Charlotte has already launched a handful of singles and EPs, externalizing her talent in the studio. These distinctions are hers and are also from techno. It is a sign of the changing times and the long reach that techno has had lately.
In 2017, Charlotte de Witte featured the DJ Mag cover in which the role of the artist in the future of techno had been left on the air. Well, it seems that the prophecy has been fulfilled. Congratulations Charlotte.
Check out the full Alternative Top 100 DJs results here and watch the winner DJ set performance below.
Image Credit: Charlotte de Witte (via Facebook)
