MUMBAI: Voting in the world's biggest DJ poll, DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs, kicks off on 15th July 2020 at 12pm BST - with a virtual twist!

As venues and festivals across the planet are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, DJing and electronic music performance has moved online. To reflect this change, DJ Mag today announced a series of weekly Top 100 DJs Virtual Festivals to give potential voters the opportunity to experience their favourite DJs and artists in a whole new way ahead of casting their votes.

The Top 100 DJs Virtual festival series, taking place every Saturday and Sunday from 18th July through to 19th September, will be broadcast across DJ Mag’s global YouTube, Facebook and Twitch channels. Saturdays will be dedicated to Top 100 DJs, with Sundays celebrating the Alternative Top 100 DJs. The Alternative Top 100 DJs, uses the same vote data as the Top 100 DJs poll, cross-referenced with Beatport sales data and a genre-filter to create a ranking to celebrate the contribution of house and techno DJs.

Confirmed Saturday DJs include reigning Top 100 DJs champions Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, David Guetta, ALOK, Mariano Bo, Don Diablo, Oliver Heldens, R3hab, Timmy Trumpet, Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano, W&W and SAYMYNAME. Sundays will be soundtracked by some of house and techno’s biggest global artists including Carl Cox, Fatima Haji, Stacey Pullen, Delano Smith, Rebekah, DJ Pierre, Solardo, Marshall Jefferson, CamelPhat, Monika Kruse, Nicole Moudaber and David Morales. Full weekly line-ups will be announced shortly.

For the fourth consecutive year, the industry-leading poll will be in aid of Unicef. To date Top 100 DJs has raised more than £70,000 for the organisation. With this money, Unicef has been able to provide enough life saving vaccines to protect 815,175 children worldwide. This year the charitable focus shifts towards responding to the Coronavirus Pandemic, as the poll will directly support Unicef's £503m emergency response fund. Viewers of the Top 100 DJs Virtual Festival live streams and voters in the poll will be invited to donate to the charity.

In the Top 100 DJs voting launch print edition (the first to be printed since the Coronavirus pandemic) DJ Mag will present an anti racism pledge to their readers. The pledge acknowledges the fact that over 90% of the DJs voted into the Top 100 DJs poll in 2019 were white, and over 90% were male. DJ Mag is committed to working to encourage voters to take into account the diversity of the international scene, both in its foundations and current make-up. As part of 2020’s results reveal, DJ Mag will ask every DJ ranked in the poll what they are doing to support Black or non-Black POC causes. These responses will be published by DJ Mag to further conversations within the scenes that the poll’s results reflect.

Top 100 DJs is a fully open poll, with no nominations or categories. Voters are simply asked to choose their top 5 DJs. They can include a DJ with 5 followers to a DJ with 5 million followers - but voters are reminded that they only get one vote each year! The 100 DJs with the most votes make the final ranking.

Top 100 DJs was born from the 100th edition of DJ Magazine back in 1993 and began as an editorially curated list. In later years it was opened to a postal ballot before going online. In 2019 more than 1.3 million votes were cast from 179 different countries, cementing Top 100 DJs position as the world's biggest publicly voted music poll.

Last year, Belgium brothers Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike took the No.1 spot, de-throning Martin Garrix after 3 successive No.1 placings. David Guetta was third while Armin van Buuren was fourth. Check out the full ranking at djmag.com/top100djs

Vote from 12pm BST on 15th July at top100djs.com