Before the summer I wrote an article trying to detail how many sales (of records, or singles) would allow a not-so-famous solo artist to live of his/her music in an era where digital download is king. While writing it, I realized that of all the possible models, printing and selling records directly, possibly in a limited edition, is still the safe bet to get some non-offensive proceedings. All the other options (from iTunes and Spotify to releasing the music for free) show basically only a good promotional – hence, not economical – potential.

But the story goes that glory doesn’t always bring the bread home, especially when an artist is prevented – for economical or logistic reasons – from organizing a dense live activity. Concerts, as a matter of fact, represent the logical non-explicit goal of releasing music for free: it’s easy to see how in these last years proceedings have moved from the content (music) to the performance, with the extra help of merchandising such as t-shirts, flags, etc.

Recently I stumbled upon a couple of interesting posts (one and two) written by a band whose profile fits the situation perfectly: Uniform Motion, a French indie trio (or duo? Not sure) whose sales amount to a few hundreds (not thousands) of units.

The idea was to promote the release of their new record (One Frame Per Second, a quite good one actually), explaining in detail what kind of money the band could expect to make on the various platforms used to distribute the album.

Results are interesting: streaming a song from Spotify has a return of €0,003 and 1000 plays of the whole record – a quite frankly ridiculous – €29,47. On Deezer the returns are more or less doubled, while Amazon and iTunes roll with a 70-30% split (each record sold pays back between 4.97€ and 6.28€). Just to put things into perspective: only to cover recording costs Uniform Motion should sell 641 records, but during the whole 2011 the band managed to sell only 225. While counting, we must consider that all their music is streamable also from their website. This is a known problem: is it convenient give away the music for free if there is not a clear way to monetize that promotion at the end of the tunnel? It clearly depends on the career expectations the band is setting for itself.

Considering the trend of previous years, Uniform Motions tried to figure out how long would it take for them to be able to live only of music, releasing one new record a year. In the article linked at the beginning of this piece, $14.000 (or €10.050) a year was established as the “minimum survival salary” for an artist: at the current grow rate, Uniform Motion would reach that goal between 2014 and 2015 (hooray?). So it would take more or less 6 years of “free” activity, at the condition they would not stop doing what they do now (meaning: free streamable music, presence on several channels for both streaming and download, physical copies).

So, here comes the final question: is it possible to live with your music if you are not already famous in this day and age?

Answer: yes, but only if you have a strong, constant and pervasive web presence. In all this Mobile Backstage could be an answer, because the importance of creating a loyal fan-base can never be stressed enough (check out the new Facebook App for bands). True fans will support most of your activity, come to your concerts (no matter what), and spread the voice about your music outside the boundaries of their circle.

Of course, it also helps having the will to persevere and lose money (let’s call it invest?) on your music, before being able to reach the magic break even some years after starting the activity.

How many artists can actually keep enthusiasm and artistic drive for such a long time? Not many. Only time will tell if natural selection favor the best, the entrepreneur-minded…or only the most stubborn ones.

I found some data (updated to 2010), and the situation can be defined, for a lack of better terms, “quite interesting”. Let’s make the case of a solo musician (not a band) willing to earn a minimum salary of $1.160 a month selling the music he, or she, composes and play.

If this musician would choose to print his record, and sell the CD at an average price of $9.90, he would be able to keep, after expenses, about 81% of the proceedings. He could then reach the “goal salary” selling 143 copies a month of that record. For somebody with talent and small crowd of fans, it wouldn’t be an impossible mission.

Going through iTunes, and considering the “selling the whole album” scenario, proceedings would drop suddenly to 9,45%. This way, reaching the “goal salary” would require 1.229 sales. This situation is similar to obtaining a decent recording deal , where sold copies would need to be at least 1.161 – or 3.871 in the case of a first contract. The drama begins when we start to count how many downloads of single songs our musician would need: 12.399, to be precise, both with iTunes and with Amazon.

The situation becomes even less appealing considering streaming services: to survive, a solo musician would have to be on air 849.817 times on Rhapsody, 1.546.667 times on Last.fm and a shocking 4.053.110 times on Spotify. Just to make a comparison, an enormusly popular band like The Cure, has a total of “only” 86.000.000 scrobbles on Last.fm.

Unconfirmed rumors speak of a $167 check given to Lady Gaga to pay for 1.000.000 plays of Poker Face on Spotify. If these numbers are true, there’s no doubt that an indie band of 4-5 elements, possibly in need of middlemen (say, a webmaster), has no hope of making a living relying just on digital distribution.

On the bright side, nothing prevents bands from using all channels at the same time, for different purposes. For example, streaming services to get the name around (or lure supporters to concerts) and “fan editions” to recup most of the expenses. Many artists seem to have embraced this philosophy: although proceedings from the music itself have shrinked, the system works for more than one band. Condition sine qua non is an intense live activity, or ends will not meet.

A fact remains: the mythologic musician that just makes music is quickly disappearing, relegated to the backlines of non-profitability. Recent developements force many bands – willing or not – into the “manage your brand” position: they have to multiply their presence both online and offline, or die trying.

A few words now on the first question we left unanswered (“What’s Apple plan?”): a new service called iCloud was introduced the 6th of June at WWDC in San Francisco. At the moment of writing its implications are not clear yet, but in the regards of iTunes it seems it will be possible to move, for $24.99 a year, all your collection of records and mp3s (original and ripped) in the cloud. Probably a good deal for iTunes power users, but nothing that could really hurt established streaming services and the new mindset they created in the audience.

For Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, though, that was the turning point. At the time, Reznor was busy ruminating on the partial failure of the record “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust”, which he was producing. Some of the things he commented back then were really revelatory of the direction he had in mind for his next opus, “Ghosts I-IV”.

“NiggyTardust” was a record one could download in standard definition for free from the website of artist Saul Williams, or, for just $5, get them at a much better quality in various formats. Two month after the stats were clear: 154,449 persons downloaded the record for free, and only 28,322 decided to pay $5 to support the artist. Saul Williams was happy (“My music is in more iPod than ever before”), Reznor instead was livid.

In the interviews back then he claimed to be disheartened by the results, adding that “music should be considered basically as free” because “the toothpaste is out of the tube. [...] If I could redo everything and start again, I think having a physical product is a good thing. [...] I think if we could wave a magic wand and do it again I think being able to offer an inexpensive version in addition to a premium physical product that could be shipped out afterward is a good thing. [...] If I had a record to put out today, I would do something very similar to what we just did cause I don’t think there is a better option. I would include a physical piece as I just said and all of the components I would make sure had value.”

Those thoughts came from the evidence that most leaks happened the moment the record left the artist’s hands to reach the printing facilities, landing in shops days after digital copies were already available on torrent sites. If the problem were the songs…why not give them away and focus on other aspects for monetization?

The idea for “Ghosts I- IV” was then born. The work itself had a massive influence and its too hard to analyze in just a few lines (if you are interested, I made a freely downloadable study about it), but it should be enough to say that the peak in concert ticket prices and the explosion of super-deluxe editions depend mostly by it.

Fast forward a couple of years: torrent sites, the nemesis of record labels, are already getting old. Almost everywhere audio streaming services are on the rise, de facto nullifying the necessity to buy – or download illegally – a CD. From Rhapsody to Spotify, a lot of new releases are now available from Day 1 directly from your favorite client. With an affordable monthly fee (9,90€ for Spotify, $10 per Rhapsody, basically two beers) it’s possible to access huge catalogues of music non stop, without commercials, at home and on the move, with a plus of several extra services.

In a situation like this, there are at least two questions worth asking:

1) Where is Apple? Cupertino’s titan is late for the party, even though something it’s supposed to be announced on June 5;

2) How convenient is the status quo for artists?

In the next part I’ll try to answer to these and other questions. Stay tuned!

This year’s GDC in San Francisco was literally packed with Finnish game developers. Among the most important games of 2010, at least two spots belonged to Helsinki-based companies: Alan Wake and Angry Birds.

Everybody was there: from Rocketpack (now acquired by Disney) to Grey Area (have you heard about Shadow Cities?), all the way up to king Rovio, fresh of an incredible new round of financing. Witnesses have it that Peter “Mighty Eagle” Vesterbacka couldn’t even walk around the showfloor undisturbed, like a true rockstar.

Acquisitions, investments and new projects: the Finnish development scene is extremely vital at both ends of the spectrum, from mobile games to triple A console blockbusters. That made me think about my 2011 todo list. What do I want to do this year?

Here we go: I would love to be involved in a game project in need of an interactive writer. For two reasons: I understand games very well and I enjoy well written games. Not only when it comes to the universe, characters and dialogues, but also when it’s the turn of captions, intros and in-game texts. So here’s my proposal:

• I want to try my hand at interactive writing: give me a game in need of a writer and I’ll make it shine
  
• Since my portfolio is lacking experience on this specific kind of writing, I’m willing to do it for dirty cheap, or even free, according to the project’s specifications

So, don’t be shy and cover me with work (I’ll love it!).

A necessary note: this offer is geared towards indie start-ups, iPhone/Android developers or lonely programmers in need of some help. If you do not belong to any of these categories, but still have something to discuss with me, do not hesitate to get in touch. We’ll sort it out, I promise.

Time to post some updates on the recent work I’ve done. First of all, I’m happy to annonce that I’ve changed my position as a Communications Specialist from Lots Oy to Microtask Ltd. If you were wondering why I care so much about crowdsourcing, now you know why.

That said, it’s not that I do not have any more spare time for some extra copywriting, so please feel free to contact Writing Bold and we will discuss if, what and how. Latest posts have been very Microtask-focused for obvious reasons. Let’s start from the oldest:

AudioDraft: for a better sounding business deals with the creation of a customized soundtrack for Microtask’s concept video:

“[...] All of which brings me to our latest partnership with AudioDraft, a platform that creates (no surprises here) custom audio productions via crowdsourced contests. We hoped AudioDraft’s eager and talented musical community would be able to devise a soundtrack for our company video – the rather funky animation that’s embedded in our homepage. The video, which explains Microtask’s concept, has already had some great feedback, but we felt it still lacked that extra spark you get from a really toe-tapping tune.

Harry Seppälä, Senior Designer at Microtask and the man responsible for the original animation, decided to put AudioDraft users to test. He drafted a concise yet informative brief, instructing would-be composers to give their tracks a slightly theatrical, old-fashioned feel. He also threw in links to a few Walt Disney cartoons (all master classes in incidental music) for added inspiration.

Results were pleasing: you can hear Andrew Higgins’ final version here. But what about the process of getting the file just right?”

Read the rest of the story here.

Second entry for today – and the most important given that it’s about a Microtask’s project going public – we speak about Digitalkoot: crowdsourcing Finnish Cultural Heritage, and the great games Mole Bridge and Mole Hunt:

“[...] We are running it in collaboration with the National Library of Finland.

The library is currently scanning and indexing its enormous archives, in order to make them searchable over the Internet and easily accessible for everyone. So far so good. The problem is that the optical character recognition software (OCR) used to input the text occasionally makes mistakes. These mistakes significantly affect the ability to search and use the archives, so must be corrected. This might seem simple enough, until you consider that the mistakes must be corrected by humans, and the National Library has four million pages of archives.

This is where Microtask comes in. Instead of spending millions of euros and many years trying to correct these mistakes using library employees, the idea is to use a voluntary crowdsourced workforce. Now the great part: rather than asking the crowd to spend time tediously reading through text that may not interest them, all they need to do is play social computer games.”

More details on our first public project at this address.

We then finish with The Travelling Salesman is back Part 1 & 2, the recollection of Kristoffer Lawson’s trip around the Nordic Countries to meet people from promising technology startups. What did he find out?

“[...] Dramas aside, Kristoffer found out some interesting – and somewhat unexpected – details about nordic tech startups during his time on the road. “Finance is what everybody is struggling with,” comments Kristoffer. He says it’s possibly even worse in Sweden than in Finland and that the two contries complain about the same things. “If you do some consumer-level technology or software, nobody knows about that, nobody wants to invest in that kind of thing. If you are looking for €100k-500k, it’s hard to get that kind of investment. All the people who have succeeded got money from abroad one way or the other. In Finland we have Tekes funding and they have something similar over there, so that’s at least something…”

He believes that in Finland, however, there is more of a joint effort going on between startups and students – Aalto Venture Garage being one example. “That’s really good,” he says, “as in Sweden everybody seemed to be a bit isolated, kind of taking care of everything alone, or more like not taking care of it. For example, there was no drive to approach the media.”

An epic journey that is worth reading in it’s entirety here and here.

There. Next time, I’ll promise to write something exclusive only to Writing Bold (damn, I’m just too busy!). For the time being, feel free to contact us for some quality technology copywriting.

WritingBold proudly presents the Mobile Backstage War Room video, Steam Republic’s take on viral propaganda…

Developed as a joint venture between Steam Republic (initial idea, product), Titanik Helsinki (animation) and WritingBold (script, advanced storyboard), the War Room video goal was to visualize the benefits of SR’s application Mobile Backstage in a media landscape that becomes each day more crowded. Questions on the table: how does Mobile Backstage score compared to social networks or traditional means of music fans engagement and why its new approach to fandom is a step up for brand involvement?

Check the video below to find out:

Now now, with my new project Players out of the door (but issue 01 is already underway) I can finally find some little time to showcase some recent work.

This update will be Microtask-centric, as the other work I’ve done is not public yet.

I would start with Adventures in Primetime, an article I came up with given my passion for people who can make science thrilling. The focus is on collaboration between scientists, the context the one of the most difficult mathematical problem of all time. The piece starts like this:

“In high school, math was my personal bane. Like countless others, I found trigonometry tedious and calculus incomprehensible. In time though, as I became older and (ahem) more mature, I started to cultivate a serious fascination for hard science. My conversion happened when I learned of the crazy characters and mad schemes behind so many groundbreaking discoveries. I might not be able to grasp every detail of quantum physics or number theory, but the writer in me can’t resist a good story.

A few years ago, I had the chance to read two amazing books: Fermat’s Last Theorem and The Music of Primes.

Before you give up and click over to Amazon to get the latest Dan Brown thriller, let me tell you just one incredible fact. If it hadn’t been for the work of mathematicians Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) and Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) you wouldn’t be able to buy anything on Amazon (or anywhere else online) at all.”

You can read the rest here.

The second piece I’ll introduce today has something to do with the technological tools each one of us can use to empower specific causes or initiatives. The focus of the industry is very much on positive outcomes of this empowerment, but what if somebody turns out to like Fight Club a bit too much? Riot in a crowded street addresses that question.

“Over the past year or so, Crowdsourcing has proved to be great in a crisis. As Ushahidi have shown in Haiti and Pakistan, with a decent software platform, you can channel the crowd into an efficient and powerful force for good.

But, as Yoda might put it: “power of the crowd, dark side it has”. If it’s possible to organize the crowd into fixing a crisis, what’s to stop someone doing the opposite? Imagine a shadowy, sinister figure (think Tyler Durden from Fight Club, only with a twitter account) who, at the click of a mouse, can incite thousands of virtual followers into carrying out his personal Project Mayhem.”

The riot continues at this link.

Last but not least for this update, Revenge of the gamers: an epic win for the world, inspired by a TED talk by Jane McGonigal. As a gamer, I always wanted my hobby to be recognized as legitimate. Now, apparently, I have all the reasons to think the time has finally come:

“[...] Jane McGonigal has some answers. Gamers are extremely self-motivated, able to weave tight-knit social networks, good at working hard (and enjoying it!) and addicted to “epic meaning” – great stories, in other words. This powerful mix creates a breed of super-empowered, hopeful individuals. The problem is, they think that they can only change virtual worlds, not the real one. (Blame their parents for this).

So the question is, how do we get gamers to use their phenomenal skill set and motivation to solve real world problems? The answer is simple: we create world-changing games for them to play. With a little help from videogame theorist Edward Castronova, that’s exactly what Jane McGonigal has set out to do.”

See the other paragraphs of this story here.

For today that’s all, but there will soon be a new update regarding my new shiny toy, Players, so stay tuned.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) copywriting is often referred to as the panacea for everything. Get it right and your website will succeed, you’ll become rich and save the world. Is that completely true? Well, if you take out the last two, almost. Practices are changing, excessive hype is out of place, but something good can come from a good SEO strategy.

When I’m not busy with tech-related-work or one of my other media project (the newest one debuts in December, I’ll speak extensively about it as soon as it’s out), I take care with some friends of a website about Finland called GuidaFinlandia.it.

It’s worth mentioning here on WritingBold because, despite the (still) basic layout, it’s a WordPress blog dense with SEO copywriting aimed at concrete results (= reach the top of Google searches for any topic related to the main subject). The idea is simple: write a guide about Finland for an Italian audience with quality content, while sustaining “the business” with incomes from Google AdSense.

If you never tried your hand at something like this, you probably are convinced that simply putting advertisements in a page is enough to make a living out of it: truth is, it’s not. There are a few things that are worth discussing, so let’s see them together.

1- Get a topic you can extensively write about

We picked Finland because all the copywriters involved in the project live here (in Helsinki, to be precise) since some years. We know the Country, its people, the good sides and also the bad ones. Writing about Finland, for us, boils down to a little research and a lot of shared real-life experiences. All of us are native Italian speakers so that isn’t an issue at all. When your topic is broad enough, you’ll have a lot of space for constant updates.

2- Pick an audience that makes sense

For Italians, Finland is still a pretty exotic country. When they decide to come in holiday over here, they don’t have many reliable resources at their disposal for general information. This means not much competition and the possibility to fill the requests of a niche quite easily. We have spoken about an international version of the website, but in that case the competition is much stronger. We will however experiment with English articles starting Q1 2011. My suggestion is to start small and expand later, which is exactly our plan.

3- Find a structure and a working method

A site that relies on Google AdSense needs two things: a constant stream of articles and an extremely well-thought structure (a good layout is an extra, but keep in mind that it must be done with the goal of having people click on ads, not being pretty). The way we pick the articles to write depends on a multitude of elements such as keywords searches, season of the year, topics we can speak about, common misspellings and popular topics.

For your project, you need to understand how many topics you can cover, in how much time, who is going to write about them, how the editing is going to work and what’s the plan with the publishing schedule.

In absolute terms, all this organization required us several meetings and a trial & error working method that we are perfecting all the time.

With five people involved, and about 15 new articles each month, we needed to make sure that the content was good enough, optimized for searches, easy to correct and right on the mark.

In short: there is no way you can skip this phase. It might look daunting at the beginning, but the good thing about this kind of projects is that work tends to diminish over time, not increase. If you get everything right, at some point you can slow down the updates and the website will auto-sustain itself.

4- Don’t dream of crazy incomes

Not in the beginning, at least. If you are not extremely clever or timely with the chosen topic (and ok, Finland might not be the most discussed topic in Italy, but we liked it), it takes many months and a lot of work before you can even repay your hosting expenses.

The good part is that, once the articles start to show up in the first page of search engines, visits can grow exponentially. That happens, of course, only if you get your SEO done right (which is to say: you need to understand statistics and know what to write first).

So, to answer the implicit question in the title: SEO copywriting will probably not make you rich, but can place your website at the top of the searches list, grant you a lot of visibility and, working with AdSense or other advertisement services, even provide a decent stable income that never runs out.

As always, if you have a great idea but need help with content or SEO copywriting, we are here to help.

Ok, I’m done complaining about being busy writing stuff. Time to display some work! This is (part of) what kept me so occupied lately. There is still some material left, which I hope to be able to showcase sooner or later, but I’ll have to wait for somebody to say the magic word first. We do, of course, copywriting also for clients’ eyes only…

Let’s start with How to Lose Friends and Predict Epidemics, a piece about the influence of our network of human connections and how to use it to our advantage. It begins like this:

“With The Social Network out in cinemas, everyone is talking about Mark Zuckerberg and his 500 million friends. Seeing as we have recently discussed Mark, today I would rather talk about his nemesis, Nicholas Christakis.

While Mark is busy building friendships, Nicholas is destroying them: according to him, if your friend gets fat, the chance of you getting fat at the same time increases by 57%. Because of Nicholas, overweight people all over the world dine alone tonight (crowd goes awwww).

To be fair to Christakis, his point is not to make you ditch your fattening beer-buddies, but rather show how real social networks influence our health, norms and behavior. To be clear, we are not talking about virtual networks like Facebook, but those networks humans have formed for thousands of years, well before the Internet became our one and only master.

Counting our family, friends and work relationships, we are connected to probably hundreds of people. They in turn are connected to hundreds of people, some of whom we are connected to and many of whom we are not. We are all embedded into that vast fabric of humanity, mutually affecting each other. As a picture, the people in a social network look a bit like stars in the night sky, all connected to their neighbors with little lines.

Christakis and his colleague Fowler focus on how the structure of social networks can help us to predict the spread of epidemics. Their ideas apply to any type of social behavior spread by people, including consumer adoption of a product or diffusion of abstract ideas such as political views.”

Read how the story unfolds on Microtask’s Blog.

Another piece I’m fond of starts with unicorns. And I know how weird it sounds, but I promise I had a really good reason to speak about them. In How to Build a unicorn-fan relationship with distributed work, I actually tackle the topic of how to forge artist-fan ties in the Year of the Lord 2010:

“[...] More successful examples of such fan-motivated crowdsourcing abound in the music world. As we mentioned in a previous post, both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have pioneered this collaboration between artists and their fans.

Continuing this experimentation, Radiohead have recently released a free-to-download video of an entire concert made from “crowdshot footage”. This followed the release by Nine Inch Nails of a free HD version of the band’s tour Lights in the Sky, also made from “distributed filming”.

Other examples of fan-made crowdsourced content abound. Star Wars: Uncut, is a project where Star Wars fans from all over the world (and, it would seem, galaxies far, far away) were asked to re-enact 15 seconds of the saga. The segments with the most votes were then put together to form a complete, hilarious remake of the movie. (If you’ve seen Jack Black’s movie Be Kind, Rewind or any “sweded movies”, you will have an idea of what to expect).

Crowdfunding is another area where the relationship between artists and fans can be one of collaboration and respect rather than the traditional one-way, idol-driven dictatorships. For example are sites like IOU Music, shaping new landscapes for artists of the future. [...]“

The uncut story – unicorns included – begins at this address.

Last but not least, I nailed down the press release for the new Mobile Backstage application of These Kids Wears Crown, a Canadian band certainly not short of screaming fans:

“Straight out of British Columbia comes EMI Music Canada’s These Kids Wear Crowns, a partycore band ramping up its music output for the big debut. Strong of a substantial crowd of supporters, TKWC are now taking the next big step connecting directly with fans through their official mobile app ‘These Kids Live‘.

‘These Kids Live’ is built on Mobile Backstage, a social app that mobilizes the fan experience, is available for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and hundreds of Java-supported handsets. Developed by the Finnish artist-fan relationship think tank Steam Republic, Mobile Backstage is available both on iTunes App Store and from the band’s website. Clickity-click on the links to get your own and see how it works directly from TKWC’s Live Feed! [...]“

Read the whole thing here.

And for today, that’s all folks!
More updates as soon as some projects switch from the status “don’t-talk-about-it” to “go ahead, kiddo”.

Now for something completely different. I’m very busy with some top secret projects, but at the same time I don’t want to leave the blog without updates for too long. The other day I found a speech I wrote in 2008 for a very special occasion, and since it’s an entertaining reading, I’ll give it a second chance here even if it’s not even slightly related with technology.

Take it as a divertissment and keep in mind that, if you are really desperate, we can help you with love letters as well (I’m joking, before someone writes in for real). A new roundup of recent works is coming very soon, promised.

The occasion was the annual party of the Media Department at the University of Helsinki.

Tradition goes that each year a boy has to write something for the girls and viceversa. As one of the few foreign students in the Master program, I was asked to carry the burden and write something amusing for all the ladies in the room. For days I’ve been torn about what to write, then I finally decided to write about the fact that I was torn, throwing into the speech some humor and even a more introspective part. If I had to rewrite it today, I would change at least one third of it, but all in all I think it still is a good speech.

One thing I clearly remember is that before and while reading it I was completely terrorized, because – I tell you now, before you start – contents are controversial to say the least, and I knew I could seriously piss off some people. The thing is, this speech was so successful I couldn’t believe it myself.

Ladies went literally crazy, so much that in the beginning I thought they were standing up to lynch me.

But they didn’t, and many of them actually came to shake my hand when I was done. Boys were slightly less pleased, but after all I wasn’t supposed to write for them. My mission was accomplished.

It’s a long one, be prepared:

You know, it has been so hard to decide what to say this night. Getting the Finnish limit of humor is still a serious problem for me. As I said to someone else, Finnish people get offended for things I normally say to my friends and then they can happily sing songs – like in the Sit Sits – that I would never ever dare to sing to anyone, not even drunk! It’s a wonderful mistery to me. 



I got a brief brainstorming with my advisor: so, things that are too romantic are to be excluded. Girlfriends get jelous. Bad jokes are not an option, if I still want some friends. The former title of this piece was: Girls and sense of humor, two parallel lines. I had to drop it.

I was thinking: let’s talk about ex-girlfriends! But even naming the topic was unleashing the rage of Olympus. Feminism? Know what, I would like to get out of here on my legs. A friend that is living in Sweden told me: if you are in one of the Nordic countries NEVER speak about women as long as it’s not something super informal. Don’t do it. Whatever you will say, they will say it’s sexist.



Isn’t it hot in here?



Then let’s say something about…shoes: there is a song in Italian that translated would go like: “What are millions, when you get in exchange…some shoes”…My expert consultant said no, politically inappropriate, and “by the way girls usually do not own more that 1 or 2 hundreds pairs of shoes”. Ok.

Then I was thinking: let’s talk about the things I cannot talk about. Because you see, writing for a Finnish audience is hard, but writing for Finnish girls is – like for all girls, I want to be clear on this point – real trouble.
 I will then have a couple of words about the women of my life…like…la mamma. That was a joke. Fat chance. I know you were expecting something about my mom, and of course she’s a holy woman like the Virgin Mary and the best cake baker I know but she’s mine and I’m not gonna share her with anyone.   



I’ve been asking around.

Somebody suggested me: make them happy, say they are beautiful and intelligent. But equally beautiful and intelligent, so they don’t get pissed. It means that if I underline that you’re beautiful somebody will come over and say: “Oh, yes, then we are all dumb blondes, isn’t it?”. And if I underline that you are more intelligent I guess I will hear somebody whispering: “What? Aren’t we nice enough for you?”. So yes. Of course you are equally beautiful and intelligent.



I was really undecided. Than I wrote a letter. It’s the sad part of the speech now, you can take out your napkins and start weeping. I’ve been observing you, during this years. I mean, Finnish people. I’ve seen relationships starting and ending. I decided then to make up a story, about a guy writing a letter to a girl living in his same building, and I’ve been inspired in this by things happened to my friends or things I could see around me on daily basis. I state here and now that any resemblance with real people is purely conicidental. It goes like this.



“Dear Nameless Girl,


this was a very long year. The winter has been snowless and muffled. The memories are fading away, with you. Yes, with you. You stopped to be a regret, and you have become a memory, and that memory is now getting every day more blurred. 
But one thing I remember. One day I was walking up the stairs and I saw you. There was wet in your hair. I was standing still, and that moment time stopped moving. We’ve been neighbors for such a long time, you know, before I even had a chance to see you. Maybe you even didn’t notice, but your apartment was next to mine.
Your room is now silent, as it was before when you were there. But back then, it was a different kind of silence. It was a silence of you.


It toke me three months to decide to come and knock on your door. When I made up my mind, you weren’t in.
 Once I met you in the laundry. I wanted to ask you something, the soap, what’s the time, whatever. But I was late, Ville and the others were waiting for me. So I didn’t say a thing, and you went away.

 In the club, in March, I was sitting with the boys in the next table and when they were not watching I tried to speak to you. I was drunk, I tried to say something cool but I could hardly command my mouth. The only thing I remember is that you said something about having a party because you were leaving for an exchange in France or what was it. Your friends dragged you on their side, you pushed me away, and that was the end of it. 

I didn’t see you again.

I don’t even know your name. I would maybe search you on Facebook, and become one of your meaningless friends. If I had your number, I could send you drunk SMS at 4.00 AM, and sleep with the head to the wall, waiting for an answer that will never come.

 But I said you stopped to be a regret. I’m sorry it went this way. I know we could be happy. I should have come to your door the day you left, and tell you that it was the wrong choice, that you had to stay. I didn’t. I’m ok now.

Maybe you found a good man over there. Some Francois Chabot, or something like that. 
I recently read a sentence in a book that I would like to share with you.

“Sometimes women do things that blow you away. You could spend your whole life trying, but you wouldn’t succeed in getting their same kind of levity. They are bright inside. Inside.”



For all that could have been, I wish you well.



Yours,
 Nameless Boy”



Now, what I wanted to say with this? I don’t know, maybe tell you a story about a relationship in Helsinki saw through Italian eyes. Maybe tell you something from the perspective of a boy. I’m not sure. Tell me if you get it. Anyway, after all this sadness we need some testosterone fireworks, and I would like to close with a message for boys like the one in the story.

From time to time I hear, as a joke, but sometimes it’s not, that Italians are here “to steal your women”. Now, I think that it would be cool just to answer, “Yes, we actually are here for that”. But what I think deep inside is not that we are stealing them, but that you let them go.

You let them go every time you choose to get wasted with beer instead of going out with them. You let them go when you don’t care. You let them go when you don’t try. Some years ago I was making dinner for one girl. You know, the thing that really shocked me, and that I still remember, is that she told me:

“No one ever before made a dinner like this for me”. 



I’ve got this Italian friend here last week, for 5 days. I can grant you he’s no Brad Pitt. Well, the second evening we went out he found his Finnish lady. It’s becoming a joke. It might well be that girls just wanna have fun. But it might also be that girls want somebody who pay attention to them, don’t you think?


I’m very sure Finnish girls are not specifically looking for us, or any other foreigner. They are looking for some real challanger out there.
 So well, if a Finnish boy is asking me again, “Are you here to steal my girlfriend?”, maybe I’ll answer:

“It depends, is she running away from you?”.


Thank you.