No, Coldplay was incredibly well liked for close to a decade. The backlash against them really didn’t develop until 2007/2008 when it was discovered they straight up stole a song.
Viva LA Vida was already sort of their abandonment of adult contemporary for a top 40 sound, and of course, it was released when I heart (then clear channel) was shutting down all the adult contemporary stations, so the pivot was going to happen regardless of whether they got caught or not, but it is interesting to note that their top hits since that happened have largely been written by others.
Nowadays, maroon 5 and coldplay are essentially the same band, its just a matter of who pays Max Martin more for the better song at album roll out time.
I feel like this is revisionist. To elder millennials and gen X, basically that entire generation of radio felt like it was formulated to pour salt in our post-grunge wounds, and Coldplay was a particularly visible example of that sanitized, focus grouped corporate influence.
Yes, but the point was, when Coldplay got big, the music scene was larger. There actually existed adult oriented pop and Coldplay was targeting those stations. There would have been a time when Fiona Apple and Coldplay shared radio time on the same station.
Fiona Apple still makes music, she just isn’t on the radio. Coldplay largely became a more youth oriented act to stay on the radio.
The public hate definitely got worse in the later 2000’s, but it was definitely still popular among middle/high schoolers to tell everyone they hated songs like Yellow and Fix You to show how “sophisticated” their tastes were. It was the same for any band that got too popular, but I remember that when Facebook opened up to people without .edu emails in 2006 I saw the Coldplay hate all over the place. One of the first online arguments I ever had was because someone said that the song The Scientist sucked, and I was really into it at the time. It’s part of why I chose my username, along with my love of biology.
