deadmau5

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• Top 6 EDM/House DJs of All Time

  Currently #5 · score 0

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• Calvin Harris

  Calvin Harris became the first artist in history to achieve six number-one singles from a single album on the UK charts with his 2012 album 18 Months, reflecting his massive commercial dominance during electronic dance music's mainstream American and European breakthrough of the early 2010s. His combination of DJ production work and his own genuine songwriting and vocal contributions distinguished Harris from producers who relied primarily on outside collaborators, and his production and songwriting work for other major pop artists extended his commercial influence well beyond his own recordings. Harris held the record for highest-paid DJ in the world for multiple consecutive years according to Forbes, reflecting the massive commercial scale electronic dance music and DJ touring reached during the genre's peak mainstream popularity in the early-to-mid 2010s. His combination of sustained chart dominance and his significant behind-the-scenes production work for other artists has made Harris one of the most commercially significant figures in electronic dance music's mainstream crossover era.

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• Avicii

  Avicii's 2013 single "Wake Me Up," blending electronic dance production with folk and country influences, became one of the best-selling singles of the decade and helped demonstrate electronic dance music's genre-blending commercial potential well beyond typical club-oriented production. His combination of melodic, emotionally accessible songwriting within an electronic dance music framework distinguished Avicii from more purely beat-driven DJ contemporaries, and his willingness to incorporate live instrumentation into his productions expanded the genre's sonic palette during its early-2010s commercial peak. Avicii's struggles with severe anxiety and the physical toll of an intense global touring schedule led him to retire from live performance in 2016 at just 26, and his death by suicide in 2018 at 28 became one of the most significant losses in electronic dance music's history. His combination of genuine genre-blending musical innovation and the tragic circumstances of his early death have made Avicii one of the most influential and mourned figures in electronic dance music, and his openness about the mental health toll of his career has contributed to broader industry conversations about touring musicians' wellbeing.

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• Daft Punk

  Daft Punk, the French duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, built their public identity around anonymity, performing exclusively in matching robotic helmets and never appearing publicly without them, a distinctive approach that made the duo's actual faces largely unknown to the general public throughout their career. Their 2013 album Random Access Memories, incorporating live studio musicians and 1970s and '80s disco and funk influences rather than purely electronic production, won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and demonstrated the duo's willingness to move away from the electronic dance sound that had originally made them famous. Daft Punk's 1997 debut album Homework and 2001 follow-up Discovery are widely credited as foundational texts in the development of French house music and electronic dance music's broader 2000s and 2010s global mainstream popularity. The duo's surprise 2021 breakup, announced through a short film titled "Epilogue" rather than a conventional press statement, ended one of the most influential and mysteriously self-mythologized partnerships in electronic music history.

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• David Guetta

  David Guetta became one of the most commercially significant DJs in bringing electronic dance music production into mainstream American pop, and his collaborations with major pop and hip-hop artists throughout the late 2000s and 2010s helped establish the "EDM-pop" crossover sound that dominated much of that era's mainstream radio. His 2009 song "When Love Takes Over," featuring Kelly Rowland, and numerous subsequent collaborations with major American artists reflected Guetta's deliberate strategy of pairing electronic dance production with mainstream pop songwriting and vocal talent to maximize commercial crossover appeal. Guetta's sustained presence atop DJ Mag's annual "Top 100 DJs" industry poll across multiple years reflected his continued commercial and cultural significance within the broader global DJ and electronic music touring circuit throughout the 2010s. His combination of genre-blending commercial production and his sustained chart success across more than a decade has made Guetta one of the most commercially significant figures in bringing electronic dance music into mainstream global pop radio.

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• Tiësto

  Tiësto became the first DJ to perform at an Olympics opening ceremony, playing at the 2004 Athens Games, a milestone that reflected electronic dance music's growing mainstream legitimacy during the early 2000s trance music era that Tiësto helped define. His extended, melodically driven trance productions throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s established Tiësto as one of the genre's most significant early figures, and his sustained relevance across multiple subsequent electronic music stylistic shifts, from trance through progressive house and later mainstream EDM, reflected unusual genre-spanning longevity. Tiësto's residencies at major Las Vegas nightclubs and his sustained presence among the highest-earning DJs globally throughout the 2010s reflected the significant commercial infrastructure electronic dance music built around superstar DJ residencies during that decade. His combination of foundational trance-era significance and his sustained multi-decade commercial relevance across changing electronic music trends has made Tiësto one of the longest continuously successful figures in the history of mainstream electronic dance music.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.