Tiësto's brand of "progressive" big-room house is one of the biggest problems facing dance music today. The fact that a producer whose sound is so heavily stuck in the house sounds of the late-80s/early-90s while simultaneously pandering to the mainstream tastes of pop audiences is described as "progressive" is both an embarrassment to club music and detrimental to the efforts of DJs whose sounds are genuinely progressive. Tiësto is the opposite of progressive or adventurous. He is a perpetual crowd-pleaser. He creates coffee shop dance and trance music that is utterly inoffensive and designed to placate and please even the most vanilla of tastes. If Tiësto is playing in the background, it doesn't get on your nerves. You just leave it on. That's all well and good - he's effectively the Adele of dance - except for the fact that he has provided a template for legions of followers. So the club scene becomes increasingly watered down by a bunch of boring, predictable and unadventurous producers that have no connection to the subcultural spaces that created the best sounds in club's history to date. Clubs should be spaces of interaction, exclusivity, sensuality, excitement, aggression and adventure. They should not be safe havens for getting drunk and dancing to the same tunes that are playing next door.