Art & Creativity Quote by Ville Valo

Los Angeles and New York show up here less as cities than as gravity wells: places where culture gets processed into product, where gatekeepers cluster, and where an artist can feel either discovered or digested. Ville Valo frames that reality in the gentle, almost parental language of inevitability: “so of course” preemptively disarms any accusation of bitterness. He’s not ranting about industry corruption; he’s normalizing disorientation. That’s a musician’s survival tactic in public: acknowledge the machine without sounding like you’re losing to it.

The subtext is about asymmetry. Newcomers arrive with songs and self-mythology; the business meets them with contracts, schedules, brand strategy, and social hierarchies. “Don’t know what to expect” is doing a lot of work, hinting at everything from financial traps to the emotional whiplash of being evaluated as a market segment. The sentence also quietly reinforces how centralized the music economy remains, even in an era that sells itself as borderless. Yes, you can upload a track from anywhere. The real leverage - management networks, radio pipelines, press, playlist relationships, tour infrastructure - still concentrates in a few zip codes.

Valo’s context matters: as a Finnish artist who broke internationally, he’s speaking from the position of someone who’s navigated that center-periphery dynamic and lived to tell it. The intent isn’t to discourage; it’s to inoculate. He’s offering a practical kind of empathy: if you feel lost in LA or New York, it’s not a personal failure. It’s the design.