Can you still hear Coldplay on a busy, noisy street?

I'm angry, and I'm done pretending I'm not. I open LinkedIn most days and it puts me in a bad mood. My inbox is worse. Three, four emails deep some mornings, and I can tell they all came out of the same tool, chasing the same reply, written like the same person sent every one of them.
And I'm angry at myself too. I've sent some of those emails. I've written some of those posts. I told myself I was different.
Here's the part I want to say once and then leave alone. This isn't only about AI. The moment creation gets cheap enough for anyone to do it, most people stop making things and start making things out of each other, copying what already worked and wearing it as their own. That was always going to happen eventually.
What AI did was remove the one thing that used to slow it down: effort. Once effort stopped costing anything, volume stopped being a choice. It became the default. AI isn't just the tool everyone's using to do this. It's a big part of why there's suddenly this much more of it to do.
I log into LinkedIn every day. Some days I'll spend thirty, forty minutes on there, just reading. I go through my inbox the same way. Most of what lands in there is outbound, and I can tell within a line or two that whoever sent it didn't think about me for more than four seconds.
Everyone bought the same tools, plugged into the same playbooks, and everyone started sounding like everyone else.
It's not that nobody's trying to be different. People are trying. Some of them aren't even trying to make content, they're trying to say something they actually believe, and that's a different, better instinct. It gives them a real point of view.
But it doesn't land as different, and that's not on them. I've lost the ability to tell it apart from everything else. My eyes and ears gave up a while ago. They're under too much pressure, all the time, to notice something good even when it's sitting right in front of them.
This didn't come up randomly. I was having coffee with @sarvagya_kul, who runs Backdoor, and he asked how I'm approaching content marketing for my own business. I told him the truth. There's real resistance in me right now about doing this. Standing out is hard enough on its own.
But even if I manage it, even if what I make is genuinely different, I'm not sure it matters, because my audience is exhausted. They've been served so much mediocre, half thought through, high volume noise that even something good might just get filed under the same.
That mental model could be wrong. That's a conversation for another day.
I asked him, who's your favorite artist? Not a question he was expecting. We were supposed to be talking GTM, pipeline, outbound, who could introduce who to whom. He paused and said, Coldplay. Respectable choice.
I told him, right now, listening to Coldplay feels like standing next to a CNC machine. Or being in the middle of a busy street, probably an Indian one. Coldplay becomes noise in that. The music hasn't changed. It's that even the most soothing thing you know starts to sound like everything else, once noise is all you've been standing in.
That's what a good email is right now. That's what a genuinely thoughtful post is right now. Coldplay, being listened to right in the middle of an Indian market, doing everything right and still going unheard.
I keep going back to that conversation. I don't know if my fear is legitimate, or if it's just a mask for my own inability to be brave and to actually commit to making things and putting myself out there.
I can't stop thinking about the analogy I dumped on Sarvagya that day. I doubt he thinks about it as much as I do.
But here's what it comes down to. You're a musician. You know that most of the people who'd actually want to hear your song are going to hear it stuck in traffic, engines idling, horns going off around them. Do you still make the album? Do you still put out the next EP? Or do you accept that by the time it reaches them, it'll just be more noise?

This piece was published on my X profile and on my Substack too.