2007 Top 10 House Music U.S. DJs
Most Popular American DJs, Determined by Dance Music Polls
The best-loved U.S. DJs, primarily based in New York and Miami, have at least 1 thing in common: they know how to move a global audience to the beat of house music.
House music may have been born in Chicago and taken root in New York City, but it belongs to the world now—so much so that Top 100 DJ lists tend to be pretty short on homegrown U.S. spinners. Here’s our list of the Top 10 U.S. DJs, all of whom coincidentally play some form of house music.
The methodology for compiling the list was simple; it’s an amalgam of this year’s Top DJs lists from DJ Mag, DJ Times and The DJ List. Each DJ in the Top 10 was ranked on all 3 lists. His individual rankings from each list were then combined, and the DJ with the lowest overall number, i.e., highest aggregate ranking, took the top honors.
D.C.-based house music DJs Deep Dish, for example, placed #11 on DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs list for 2007, #8 in DJ Times’ second annual list of Top 100 American DJs (announced in September in Ibiza), and #7 on the The DJ List Web site (a ranking of the world’s DJs that’s updated constantly; registered members vote once a month for their top 10 DJs), for a total of 26, securing them the top spot.
Combining rankings from different lists seemed the best way to eliminate, or at least mitigate, whatever regional biases or unseen agendas (or voter fraud!) might be inherent in any one list.
The UK-based DJ Mag’s poll, based on reader votes, tends to be, as dance music itself is these days, Eurocentric. Thus, some veteran house music DJs from the U.S.—including George Acosta (#1 on DJ Times’ list, #29 on The DJ List) and Frankie Knuckles (#67, DJ Times; #73, The DJ List) are ignored by DJ Mag readers. In fact, only 15 U.S. DJs are ranked on all 3 lists; only the 10 shown below made the Top 100 on all 3 (we cheated slightly with Calderone, who’s ranked #108 on The DJ List).
Two notable absences from the list are Bad Boy Bill (#38, DJ Mag; #3, DJ Times), who is inexplicably unranked on The DJ List, and Christopher Lawrence (#10, DJ Times; #133 The DJ List), who was disqualified from DJ Mag’s poll.
Here's the list of the top-ranking U.S. DJs of 2007. Check back often for updates on their releases and tour schedules.
Top 10 House Music DJs Based in the United States
- Deep Dish (Washington, D.C.)
- Markus Schulz (Miami)
- Gabriel & Dresden (San Francisco)
- Erick Morillo (NYC, Miami)
- Roger Sanchez (NYC)
- Danny Tenaglia (NYC, Miami)
- BT (L.A.)
- Robbie Rivera (Miami)
- Armand van Helden (NYC)
- Victor Calderone (NYC)
