Out of curiosity, I've decided to check out this year's DJ Mag Top 100 DJs list and I noticed that as of this year only five Trance or Trance-related DJs remain on the list which are:
5. Armin van Buuren
30. Above & Beyond
38. Paul van Dyk
42. ATB
87. Ferry Corsten
I'm not really surprised at Armin van Buuren, Above & Beyond and even Ferry Corsten, after all, Armin is popular and poppy enough to satisfy pretty much everyone even if most of the music he promotes there is highly questionable.
Above & Beyond on the other hand became their own thing and really popular at it, they are only Trance by association at this point, though.
Ferry Corsten became a monthly resident DJ at the ASOT Radioshow since 2020 so no surprises here.
Paul van Dyk is somewhat suprising since I haven't seen him being that much popular or even releasing something extremely remarkable as of late but since he has quite a legacy at this point it still doesn't come off as a full surprise to me.
The biggest surprise is ATB, seriously, I'm often astonished at how popular he apparently still is despite the fact that he has never really been a high-profile DJ in the scene itself, after all, Armin would barely play his tracks even during his golden years, he doesn't have a radioshow of his own, yet here is, once again on the list, I mean, sure last year it had a tremendous hit with his own remake of "9PM" but that was just one hit, I highly doubt he any other extremely successful tracks after that one.
With all this being said and done, I think there is one thing we can take from this list: Trance is no longer the relevant music genre it used to be, it has been surpassed by a considerable amount of music genres at this point, in fact, Techno is way more popular than Trance at this point, judging by the number of Techno DJs compared to the number of Trance ones, it's quite clear that even Techno is way more popular than Trance, the only genre which has clearly died at this point is Hardstyle, along with Hardcore/Gabber, the only ones who still remain on that list from those genres are Angerfist, Brennan Heart and Miss Kate, so, yeah, we can call those have-been genres at this point.
5. Armin van Buuren
30. Above & Beyond
38. Paul van Dyk
42. ATB
87. Ferry Corsten
I'm not really surprised at Armin van Buuren, Above & Beyond and even Ferry Corsten, after all, Armin is popular and poppy enough to satisfy pretty much everyone even if most of the music he promotes there is highly questionable.
Above & Beyond on the other hand became their own thing and really popular at it, they are only Trance by association at this point, though.
Ferry Corsten became a monthly resident DJ at the ASOT Radioshow since 2020 so no surprises here.
Paul van Dyk is somewhat suprising since I haven't seen him being that much popular or even releasing something extremely remarkable as of late but since he has quite a legacy at this point it still doesn't come off as a full surprise to me.
The biggest surprise is ATB, seriously, I'm often astonished at how popular he apparently still is despite the fact that he has never really been a high-profile DJ in the scene itself, after all, Armin would barely play his tracks even during his golden years, he doesn't have a radioshow of his own, yet here is, once again on the list, I mean, sure last year it had a tremendous hit with his own remake of "9PM" but that was just one hit, I highly doubt he any other extremely successful tracks after that one.
With all this being said and done, I think there is one thing we can take from this list: Trance is no longer the relevant music genre it used to be, it has been surpassed by a considerable amount of music genres at this point, in fact, Techno is way more popular than Trance at this point, judging by the number of Techno DJs compared to the number of Trance ones, it's quite clear that even Techno is way more popular than Trance, the only genre which has clearly died at this point is Hardstyle, along with Hardcore/Gabber, the only ones who still remain on that list from those genres are Angerfist, Brennan Heart and Miss Kate, so, yeah, we can call those have-been genres at this point.