Somewhere in the north of Finland, on a square in the middle of a city, several thousand people are standing in the dark watching a person play a guitar that does not exist.
There is a five-member jury. There are scores. There is a trophy. There are national qualifying rounds in more than a dozen countries, and the winners of those rounds fly to Finland to compete. The event is in its third decade. The motto, printed on the banners, is “Make Air Not War.”
This is a real thing that real adults do, every August, on purpose. 🎸
It started at a video festival
In 1996, the Oulu Music Video Festival needed a side event. The musician Jukka Takalo had an idea: a competition for air guitar. It was meant, one gathers, as a bit of fun to run alongside the main programme.
The bit of fun did not stay a side event. It outgrew the festival, became its own thing, and has been produced since 2011 by a company — Airnest Productions — whose actual job is the world championship of an imaginary instrument. 🎬
The rules are extremely serious
This is the part that gets me. Having invented a competition about pretending, everybody involved decided to be completely rigorous about it.
You play two songs, in two rounds, sixty seconds each. The first song you choose yourself. The second one the organizers choose for you, and you find out what it is when everyone else does.
Props and costumes are allowed. Backup bands and real instruments are not. You may, per the official rules, “use an electric or an acoustic air guitar, or both.” 🎸
A five-member jury of performing-arts professionals scores each round from 4.0 to 6.0, figure-skating style, and the two rounds are added together. The highest total wins.
And what are they scoring, exactly? The official criteria: originality, the ability to be taken over by the music, stage presence, technical merit, artistic impression — and, last on the list, “Airness.”
That’s it. That’s the whole word. The rules name it as a criterion and then simply move on, on the apparent assumption that you already know. ✨
The prize is a real guitar
You cannot win an air guitar, because there is nothing to hand you. So the champion is given an actual, physical, custom-made instrument: the “Flying Finn,” built by the Finnish guitar makers Matti and Saara Nevalainen.
One year, Brian May — the lead guitarist of Queen — donated a VOX amplifier for the winner. 🔊
So the reward for the world’s finest performance on an imaginary guitar is a real guitar, and once, an amp from Queen.
Finland spent 25 years losing its own championship
Here is the arc, and it is a good one.
For the first five years, Finland won everything. Oikku Ylinen in 1996, then Ville Paakkari, Juha Hippi, Johanna Ala-Siurua, and Markus Vainionpää in 2000. The home team swept its own invention, five for five.
Then the rest of the planet turned up.
Zac “Mr. Magnet” Monro took it to Britain in 2001 and again in 2002. Then the United States, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, France, Germany, Russia, Canada. In 2022 a Kenyan air guitarist, Charles Kariuki “Slim” Ndung’u, shared the bronze. The trophy went everywhere except home.
Twenty-five years. Finland hosted the thing every single August, built the stage, printed the banners, made the guitar — and watched somebody from somewhere else pick it up and carry it onto a plane.
Then in August 2025, at the 28th championships, a Finn named Aapo “The Angus” Rautio came through a final that included the defending champion, eight national champions and seven qualifiers — and the title came home for the first time since 2000. The Associated Press covered it. The headline was “Don’t fret.” 🇫🇮
The people who keep coming back
The championship has dynasties, which is a very funny sentence to write about air guitar.
Nanami “Seven Seas” Nagura of Japan — the performer in the photo at the top of this post — has won it three times: 2014, 2018, and 2023.
And then there’s Matt “Airistotle” Burns of the United States, who came second in 2012, second again in 2014, second again in 2015 — and then finally won it in 2016, and defended it in 2017. Four separate years he stood on that stage in Oulu and was told he was the second-best person in the world at playing a guitar that isn’t there. He kept flying back. 🏆
Why this lives on a good-news blog
Because of the reason they say they’re doing it. Not as a wink, not as a bit — it’s written down in the competition’s own ideology, and the organizers restate it to reporters with a completely straight face:
“Wars will end, climate change will stop and all bad things will vanish when all the people in the world play the air guitar.”
That is, obviously, not how any of that works. Everyone in Oulu knows it isn’t how any of that works.
They do it anyway. Nearly thirty years on, a city in northern Finland still invites the entire world to stand on a stage in a costume and pretend, in front of strangers, with total commitment and zero self-protection, and be judged on it kindly by people who take it seriously. Somebody flies in from Kenya. Somebody flies in from Japan. Somebody comes second four times and books the flight again.
The instrument is imaginary. The being-taken-over-by-the-music is not. Make air, not war. 🎸💛
