Swamp Records is here to play.
Rachel Ring, 20-year-old UF management senior and director of Swamp Records, said the new university record label will focus on enhancing the careers of local Gainesville musicians.
“It’s a student-run record label under the umbrella of Student Government Productions,” she said. “We want to enhance the careers of artists in and around the Gainesville community.”
Swamp Records is the brainchild of Ring and Breana Auberry, who came up with the idea while interning in New York City this summer.
Ring said the label will produce mainly hip-hop, electronic dance music and indie music because they’ve found it most popular among UF students.
Daniel Levin, a 21-year-old UF industrial and systems engineering senior and chairman of SGP, said that Swamp Records’ budget is “less than a couple thousand,” and funds are available on a case-by-case basis.
Ring said they hope the program, which they call an educational experience for all students involved, will be signing artists by 2014.
“This semester is purely about getting us ready, getting the resources in place,” she said. “Next semester, in 2014, is when we’re actually going to be out in the community and be working with these bands.”
The steps to signing an artist into the label are still under works, but Ring said she hopes to have a preliminary process ready by the launch of their website, which will be within the next month.
Breana Auberry, a 20-year-old advertising junior and the assistant head director of Swamp Records, said the idea of a student-run record label at UF isn’t a new one.
She said that a nonfunctioning record label, called SGP Records, has existed for about two years.
“SGP Records is an idea that wasn’t fully developed or put in action completely, and that’s why we rebranded it as Swamp Records,” she said.
Jared Glosser, a 21-year-old UF history senior and the events director for Swamp Records, said the short-term goal for the organization is to sign at least one or two artists in 2014.
“Long term, in the next five to 10 years, we want to have artists that have come through and been a part of Swamp Records make it big,” he said.
The Swamp Records team is currently made up of about 20 people, Auberry said, and they are looking to learn as they go on this project.
“Everything that can be done at this record label, from promotions, to PR, to recording, to distribution, to marketing; everything is going to be done by students,” she said. “It’s basically real-life experience building a record label from the ground up.”
A version of this story ran on page 1 on 10/28/2013 under the headline "UF to produce hip-hop, EDM and indie under its own record label"
