Editing Progressive house (section)

=== Backlash and Decline (2000–2005) ===

By the early 2000s, progressive house had become a victim of its own success. The genre's original qualities — long track structures, emotional restraint, sophisticated layering — were increasingly imitated by producers who applied the format without the substance. Dave Seaman, one of the genre's originators, summarised the problem: the music had followed the same trajectory as [[progressive rock]] before it, becoming, in his words, "pompous, po-faced and full of its own self-importance."

The underground scene fragmented. Some DJs who had previously played progressive house began relabelling their output as [[tech house]], [[techno]], or [[deep house]], reflecting how blurred the genre boundaries had become. Concurrently, a new wave of producers took the "progressive house" label in a more commercial direction, incorporating elements of Eurodance and uplifting [[trance]] that bore little relationship to the original 1992 sound.