<\/p>\n
Knights Records President Dany Melo (center left) and Vice President Tommy Mu\u00f1oz (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.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Gabby Govantes<\/p>\n
Knights Records, UCF’s mock record label,\u00a0fosters a music-loving community by promoting up-and-coming independent student musicians.<\/p>\n
The mock label establishes what an aspiring musician and music manager would experience in the real world, offering experience to those who\u00a0strive to work in the music industry.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Melo founded the club because she wanted to\u00a0gain experience in the music industry and has a passion for\u00a0connecting artists with the general public.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t see that there’s a lot of opportunity to get industry experience within UCF,\u201d Melo said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The club consists of\u00a0helping artists create branding, logos and overall opportunities. It helps aspiring musicians get acquainted with the music industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s what the overall club is here to do,\u201d said Gabby Govantes, senior visual communications major and artist manager. \u201cWe’re here to help out the artists and get them to where they need to be with what they want from us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Govantes, apart from being UCF musician Ant Moreiro\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m very in tune with how important [social media] is to promote music right now,\u201d Govantes said.\u2029\u201dIt’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.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to\u00a0fostering community within Knights Records, the\u00a0club’s artist managers\u00a0build strong connections with their respective artists.<\/p>\n
Tommy Mu\u00f1oz, junior information technology major and vice president of the club,\u00a0highlights the friendship he has with\u00a0ten7teen, the UCF artist he manages.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s been a really good working relationship because not only am I his artist manager, but we’ve also become friends,\u201d Mu\u00f1oz said.<\/p>\n
Slowly but surely, Knights Records has accumulated more members and created\u00a0its own collective group.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou’ll see people that I know don’t know each other from outside starting to talk to each other at the meetings,\u201d Mu\u00f1oz said. \u201cSo obviously that’s pretty rewarding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Govantes also said the best part of the club was the niche music-loving community that was formed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cDefinitely 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,\u201d Govantes said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201c[We are looking for] people who either are in marketing, or people who are on the creative side,\u201d Melo said. \u201cSo like, videographers, photographers, people who want to work within music videos or just on very creative projects.\u2029That’s kind of what we’re missing right now for our artists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Melo did not expect the success that Knights Records has experienced in such a short time; it has evolved from an idea into\u00a0an actual organization\u00a0born of a devotion to music.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeeing this come to life, this is like a passion project that I didn’t think would come to this scale,\u201d Melo said. \u201cI hope it gets bigger and I hope we do more, it literally came from a paper idea and now it\u2019s actual people working and we’re actually helping artists.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Knights Records President Dany Melo (center left) and Vice President Tommy Mu\u00f1oz (center right) at the Knights Records…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1209,1210,1407,139,141,140],"class_list":["post-192647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-culture","tag-life","tag-music","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}