Process

The previous season, as part of Shark Week, I had created a playlist with a song for each game. The idea had decent reception - the playlist had 192 follows on Spotify - but as it was a month after the schedule was released, it was somewhat overlooked in the greater media cycle.

So, knowing that this idea had already been received well but would still be novel to a majority of fans, I decided to repeat the idea with a whole new batch of songs.

The twist is that NHL social media teams don’t get their hands on the schedule until less than 24 hours before the official release - and there are often edits in the final hour before the release.

To solve that issue, I created a brainstorming document with up to four songs for each team - the maximum number of games the Sharks could play a single team - so I could mix and match once I got a look at what the schedule could be.

Execution

There were three parts to this project: the art, the Spotify, and the playlist itself.

Using my design skills, I created a playlist cover to mirror the upcoming 2019-20 marketing campaign. I also created a back cover to hold the playlist written out; one of the reactions I noticed from the previous attempt was that there wasn’t anything for people to easily screenshot and share.

On Spotify, to ensure secrecy, I created a dummy private playlist where I loaded songs in and would drag and drop the order. Once it was the morning of the release, I copied those songs into a public playlist.

Finally: the playlist itself. It was an entirely tongue-in-cheek series of jokes based on the team name or hockey reference. A sampling of the explanations:

• Vegas Golden Knights was entirely callbacks to an incredibly memorable Game 7 of the playoffs in which they gave up 4 goals in 4 minutes on a penalty kill.

• Buffalo Sabres referenced Taro Tsujimoto, a fictional hockey player they drafted in the 1970s. Seriously.

• Columbus Blue Jackets had songs about cannons, as they have a terrifying cannon that fires after goals.

• Edmonton Oilers, whose abbreviation is EDM, exclusively had EDM songs.

• Toronto Maple Leafs referenced their last Cup win (1967).

• Dallas Stars used 1999 by Prince - the last time they won the Cup, plus the artist is from their original city prior to relocation. 

• Vancouver Canucks had “Sounds of Sad Whales” because when you find a song named that, you use it.

Results

The post itself earned 1.1K retweets and 2.3K favorites, while the playlist got 419 follows. The post was quote-tweeted extensively, and reached outside of the San Jose Sharks audience - it became a game for opposing fans to find their songs and figure out the reference.

Notably, this schedule release was the only one featured in Yahoo! Sports, dubbed “easily the best schedule release from a team Twitter account.”

The next season, faced with COVID-19 limitations, I repeated the idea again, which also had good results.