Community Member Q&A: Andres Botero, Manga Creative Studios

Hello!

To platform more voices from the Water & Music community, we’ve decided to reignite our Community Member Q&A section. Biweekly, we’ll be running a Q&A with W&M members doing particularly innovative or interesting work with music and technology.

This week, we’re speaking to Andres Botero, CEO and Founder at Manga Creative Studios. Andres has had over 15 years of experience in the latin urban scene, running independent record labels in his native Colombia, and he’s also just joined NFT marketplace Catalog as a music curator.

How did you get your start working in the music industry?

Music has been the driving force of my life since I was a child. I started playing the piano as a kid and then as a teenager started to experiment with recording with the few tools that were available at the time which were 4-track cassette recorders. I also assisted in sessions at Estudios Niche, which was owned by Jairo Varela the director of the legendary salsa orchestra “Grupo Niche”. After that, I went to school at Berklee College of Music and double majored in music production and engineering and music synth. After graduation, I came back home to Colombia and started an independent label, Discosoye and started working professionally in the Colombian music industry which was still very raw back in the day.

What’s been the biggest ‘win’ in your career so far?

It’s funny how important moments are best understood and properly valued after the fact, and there have been many of them. I think one of the most relevant  was when as at an independent record label, we were able to have a significant portion of the market share of recorded music in Colombia.

What piece of advice has been the most useful to you throughout your career?

3The best piece of advice was given to me not in the form of advice per se but as thoughts by my teacher Carl Beatty. He always emphasized that his job as a mix engineer was to be a helper. His job was to help the artist make the best record possible. Actually, a few months ago I was revisiting a documentary in which Jon Landau reminds Jimmy Lovine of his role, which was helping Bruce Springsteen make his record. I’m very much of that old-school mentality — that studio people are there to help art be born with the best quality and to help the artist fulfill their vision.

Could you tell us a bit more about your role at Catalog?

I feel very fortunate to be able to be a part of the community at Catalog. I think their value proposition around musical art is unique. As a curator, I’ve chosen to onboard artists from our local community with a common thread of having social impact besides being really fucking cool.

What are you listening to at the moment?

Slipknot, always.