Was Avicii Really the Best EDM DJ in the World?
Ask a room full of dance-music fans who the best EDM DJ ever is and one name comes back with total conviction: Avicii. The Swedish producer who dragged melodic dance music onto pop radio, then died at 28 — his legend has only grown since. But ask how you’d prove it, and the certainty falls apart. “Best” turns out not to be one scoreboard. It’s eight. And they don’t agree.
The belief
Avicii is the number one — not just a great EDM artist, but the best in the world. It’s a claim you hear as if it were a settled fact. The trouble is that it quietly blends two very different things: whether Avicii made the best songs, and whether he had the biggest career. Split those apart and the answer splits with them.
Eight scoreboards, one clean split
There is no single “best DJ” number. Decompose it into the eight things people actually mean, and a pattern appears immediately: Avicii wins every axis about the music, and loses every axis about the career.
Where Avicii wins: the songs
This is the case his believers are really making, and the data backs it hard. “Wake Me Up” is not just a big Avicii song — it is one of the biggest dance records ever pressed.
Spotify streams for 'Wake Me Up' — and it holds a RIAA Diamond certification, making it the most-certified dance/electronic song in the history of American recorded music.
Stack his signature single against the biggest hits of the artists usually named alongside him, and Avicii isn’t just competitive — he’s at the very top of the pile, tied with The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” and ahead of the biggest records by Calvin Harris and Marshmello.
And this is not a one-hit story dressed up. Rolling Stone put “Levels” at #52 on its 200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time; Billboard has called it “one of the most important pop songs of the 21st century.” Two different Avicii records sit in the permanent canon — and he did it with a catalog cut short in 2018.
career Spotify streams — enough to make Avicii the 96th most-streamed artist of all time, reached almost entirely posthumously, from one of the smallest catalogs on this list. Streams per release, nobody here is more efficient.
Where Avicii loses: the career
Now the other four scoreboards — the ones about scale, longevity, and industry standing. Here the story inverts, and it’s not close.
Start with the industry’s own popularity contest. The DJ Mag Top 100 is a global fan poll, and Avicii never won it. His ceiling was #3, back in 2013. Meanwhile the artists who did win kept winning.
Calvin Harris topped Forbes’ highest-paid-DJ list for five straight years — pulling $66 million in a single year at his peak — before The Chainsmokers finally overtook him. Avicii never sat at the top of that list. On the money scoreboard, this was never his contest.
The awards ledger is even starker. Skrillex has collected roughly nine Grammys; Daft Punk swept the 2014 ceremony including Album of the Year. Avicii was nominated and went home empty-handed — zero Grammy wins. And on raw present-day reach, the still-active headliners lead: even eight years after his death Avicii pulls a remarkable 38 million monthly Spotify listeners, but David Guetta and Calvin Harris are well ahead.
Verdict
Mixed. The belief is half-right — and which half depends entirely on what you mean by “best.”
If “best” means the songs — the biggest hits, the records that outlive their moment, the deepest mark on the genre — then yes, Avicii has a real claim to number one. “Wake Me Up” is the most-certified dance song in American history, two of his tracks sit in the all-time canon, and he reached the top 100 most-streamed artists ever from a catalog cut off at 28. On the four song-and-legacy scoreboards, he sweeps.
But if “best” means the career — the poll wins, the earnings, the awards, the sustained reach — Avicii isn’t number one and never was, even while alive. Calvin Harris out-earned everyone for years. David Guetta, Martin Garrix, and Armin van Buuren own the fan poll. Skrillex owns the Grammys. On those four scoreboards, Avicii doesn’t place near the top.
So the honest answer to “is Avicii the best EDM DJ in the world?” is another question: best at what? He is, very defensibly, the best hitmaker the genre has produced. He was never its most decorated, best-paid, or most-voted-for DJ. The belief isn’t wrong — it’s just measuring the thing Avicii was actually great at, and quietly assuming it settles a contest it doesn’t.