Seeing teams take advantage of social media to do fun things with their fans is great to see. More fan interaction is a good thing. The Ottawa Senators are trying to do something fun with their fans by letting anyone who “likes” their Facebook page get the chance to cast a vote for what they want to have the Senators use as the team’s goal song this season.
The Sens’ campaign was even done in a most honorable and open way. According to the site, here’s how they decided on picking the final five songs for fans to pick from to be their celebration song.
Those five songs were mostly decent when it comes to the choices. Songs from The Black Keys (“Howling For You”), The White Stripes (a remix of “Seven Nation Army”), and Locksley (“The Whip”) were among the five finalists. The other two songs? Nickelback’s “Burn It To The Ground” and Britney Spears’ “Til The World Ends.” Uh oh.
Among those songs, The Black Keys’ tune is already being used by the Phoenix Coyotes as their goal song. Britney Spears and hockey? Perhaps the Sens are hoping to lure her to Ottawa to fill Carrie Underwood’s old seat at games. Nickelback’s song used to be the Islanders’ goal song and is still used as the main theme on WWE’s Monday Night Raw. Nickelback is also pretty much universally reviled on the Internet.
In theory, it sounds like a great thing that opens things up to the fans to make a Senators goal at home a reason for everyone to celebrate with a song that will become iconic for the team and rally the fans into a frenzy. Of course, when it comes to the Internet things don’t always go according to plan and the Senators’ rivals from Toronto are stuffing the ballot box in favor of Nickelback.
It’s Internet trolling at its finest. Of course, Nickelback is a Canadian band and they’ve sold millions of albums worldwide so they’ve got that going for them, but hockey fans and Nickelback don’t seem to blend too well. Nickelback was invited to play the opening night kickoff event in Winnipeg which led Jets fans to petition the NHL to not send the band to their big party. Ouch.
While Leafs fans are doing a hilarious thing to rile up their rivals and make their home games more miserable, the joke might be on them as the Senators appear to be a team that’s going to struggle scoring goals at all this year. It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thing for the Senators as their team is going to have a hard time scoring and goals will be at a premium but when they do, it appears they’ll be stuck listening to Nickelback unless more Senators fans swarm their Facebook page and take the power back.
This whole thing doesn’t take into account how this is a huge missed opportunity for fans to get Britney Spears to have a team’s goal song. Consider us as a part of Team Britney as long as we’re in the business of giving teams an embarrassing goal song.