Knights Records President Dany Melo (center left) and Vice President Tommy Muñoz (center right) at the Knights Records meeting on Thursday in the Mathematical Sciences Building. Every Thursday, they host social events and guest speaker panels to gain insights from professionals in the music industry.
Courtesy of Gabby Govantes
Knights Records, UCF’s mock record label, fosters a music-loving community by promoting up-and-coming independent student musicians.
The mock label establishes what an aspiring musician and music manager would experience in the real world, offering experience to those who strive to work in the music industry.
Knights Records was founded in February 2025 by Dany Melo, junior entertainment management major. The president and artist manager of the organization, she oversees the entire club and manages UCF musician Daniel Vu.
Melo founded the club because she wanted to gain experience in the music industry and has a passion for connecting artists with the general public.
“I don’t see that there’s a lot of opportunity to get industry experience within UCF,” Melo said. “I want to be able to give people the actual experience. I love helping out emerging artists or just people who don’t have the resources to promote themselves; I just love helping artists in general.”
The club consists of helping artists create branding, logos and overall opportunities. It helps aspiring musicians get acquainted with the music industry.
“That’s what the overall club is here to do,” said Gabby Govantes, senior visual communications major and artist manager. “We’re here to help out the artists and get them to where they need to be with what they want from us.”
Govantes, apart from being UCF musician Ant Moreiro’s manager, also runs the Knights Records’ social media. She emphasizes the importance of using social media for promotion if indie musicians want to make it professionally.
“I’m very in tune with how important [social media] is to promote music right now,” Govantes said. ”It’s not necessarily that you get signed to a label and they do it all for you. Now you have to promote yourself to a point on socials and then a record label will find you and sign you that way.”
In addition to fostering community within Knights Records, the club’s artist managers build strong connections with their respective artists.
Tommy Muñoz, junior information technology major and vice president of the club, highlights the friendship he has with ten7teen, the UCF artist he manages.
“It’s been a really good working relationship because not only am I his artist manager, but we’ve also become friends,” Muñoz said.
Slowly but surely, Knights Records has accumulated more members and created its own collective group.
“You’ll see people that I know don’t know each other from outside starting to talk to each other at the meetings,” Muñoz said. “So obviously that’s pretty rewarding.”
Govantes also said the best part of the club was the niche music-loving community that was formed.
“Definitely the community that we built, everyone in the club has been super friendly and comfortable and I feel like I’ve genuinely made real friends,” Govantes said.
Because Knights Records has been built from the ground up, it is still in the process of evolving into something more established and is looking for new members passionate about the music industry.
“[We are looking for] people who either are in marketing, or people who are on the creative side,” Melo said. “So like, videographers, photographers, people who want to work within music videos or just on very creative projects. That’s kind of what we’re missing right now for our artists.”
Melo did not expect the success that Knights Records has experienced in such a short time; it has evolved from an idea into an actual organization born of a devotion to music.
“Seeing this come to life, this is like a passion project that I didn’t think would come to this scale,” Melo said. “I hope it gets bigger and I hope we do more, it literally came from a paper idea and now it’s actual people working and we’re actually helping artists.”