We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Bota a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Chris, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

Currently I am making a full-time living as a creative from a mix of different income sources. I gig with my main original band project, Desmond Jones, I teach private music lessons, I play church gigs a couple times a week, I do wedding gigs and cover band gigs, and I also am a TA for an “Intro to Finance” course through an online college. I have been building this type of career for about 10 years now and it started much different than it looks today.

I graduated MSU with a Bachelor’s in Finance in 2013 and immediately started working in the automotive industry as a Financial Analyst. While I was doing this, my bandmates in Desmond Jones were finishing up college and I would still do gigs with them regularly. In 2015, when my bandmates graduated, we all moved to Grand Rapids, MI to pursue music as a full time career. From 2015-2019, I would play around 130 gigs a year on average while still holding down a handful of different part time finance/accounting jobs. During this time, I was building up my music teaching career and continually increasing the amount of students I taught per week.

When COVID became a thing, all of my accounting jobs dried up and I was pretty much left with just teaching music as gigs were also non-existent during lockdown. When the world opened back up, I decided to drop any part time accounting/finance gigs so I could focus 100% on gigging and teaching. I still keep my job as a TA just because I do enjoy Finance and it works out the side of my brain I don’t use as much working as a creative :).

While I do wish I would have dove head first into a full time music career right out of college, I am happy that I continued to hold down other jobs while I was honing my craft and that allowed me to focus a bit more on the art of music while I had other jobs that helped me stay financially afloat. I also am very appreciative of the fact that this path allowed me to build many business skills that are now helping me succeed in the music industry.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Chris Bota, I am 31 years old, and I am a professional musician and music educator. My main career focus is working with my band, Desmond Jones. I met all of the my band mates around MSU’s campus around 11 years ago and I founded the band a bit over 10 years ago with George Falk, John Nowak, Isaac Berkowitz, and a couple other musicians who are no longer in the project. We write, record, and play our original music all over the country and have big plans and aspirations to keep building this project and hopefully continuing to do so for decades to come.

Knowing that it is extremely difficult to make a living playing original music, I have built a part-time career around Desmond Jones that is meant to support myself as Desmond Jones continues to grow to a point where we can financially support all of the band members and team members at a full time level. As I grew this “part-time career” around my band, I began to realize how important music education was to me and how beneficial teaching music was in my own artistic path.

Currently, my “part-time career” that I have coupled with my Desmond Jones career has blossomed into a beautiful music education career. One year ago, I decided to partner with my fiance, Hannah Laine, at her newly opened music education studio, “Seed Sound Studios”, located in the Creston neighborhood of Grand Rapids, MI. At Seed Sound, our focus is helping aspiring artists find their own unique voice while learning the skill sets necessary to share that art with the world. This type of teaching not only focuses on the hard rudiments of music education but also skills set usually glossed over in traditional music education such as home recording, prepping for a studio session, etiquette when hiring professionals to join you in stage or at a recording, online promotion, etc.

While I started playing music at a young age (5/6 years old), I didn’t realize I wanted to pursue music as a career until I was about 18/19. I am the only creative in my immediate family so I didn’t really even think of music as a viable career choice until I was in college. As a kid, I was mostly focused on sports and education, which seemed to be what my community valued the most. Because of this experience, I want to make sure that Seed Sound Studios offers the motivated, inspiration, and expertise to help budding creatives find a space where they can explore what their personal art means to them!

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Currently, I think the USA takes our artists for granted. We are blessed with so many amazing artists, art scenes, and a beautiful artistic history in the USA but the “starving artist” archetype lives on. It is almost expected that an artist in the US is either famous and wealthy, or unknown and poor. Going on step further, the “starving artist” archetype is almost romanticized to the point that artists themselves think that the struggle of “making it” as an artist by living on next to nothing for years is a right of passage or seen as necessary to evolve into a full fledged artist.

It is hard for me to put into words what I think our society can do to better support artists but I think it boils down to a need for a total paradigm shift on how our society views artists, educates our young people in the arts, and supports the arts. I feel as though mainstream society views art (specifically music and fine art such as sculpting, painting, etc.) as a luxury and something that isn’t necessary when times are tough. Usually, this boils down to business cutting their art expenses first before anything else. A lot of people in the US view art as a hobby that isn’t supposed to be a full time career. But at the same time, our society is constantly consuming art! There are paintings hung up in pretty much any building you enter, music is played at most businesses you can visit, people spend countless hours a week watching TV and movies, the list goes on!

Because this is such a complex issue, I think a first step is increasing funding for art education for children and adults. Most Americans are very removed from the art world and do not understand the amount of training and effort that goes into an artists career. I know that when I began to learn more about art at I young age I began to see the value in it and appreciate it even more.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

One of my big goals in life is to help inspire mainstream culture to treat artists like they treat any other professional. Artists deserve to be financially stable so we can continue to create art and positively influence culture. There aren’t a lot of “entry-level” positions for young artists and there are also not a lot of organizations set up to support artists while they get their careers off of the ground.

I would love to eventually work towards growing an ecosystem where younger artists could find support such as funding for their albums, loans for producing a tour, marketing support systems, mentorships, etc. While these types of support systems do exists, they are much less plentiful than you would find in different industries and usually these support systems are expensive to join (music colleges, music camps, etc.)

Contact Info:

• Website: www.chrisbotamusic.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisbotamusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091996705155
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DesmondJonesBand
• Other: https://linktr.ee/desmondjonesband https://www.instagram.com/seedsoundstudios/ https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=seed%20sound%20studios

Image Credits
Nathan Purchase – Live Band image, image of me playing guitar, image of me in blue jeans Loren Johnson (Sunfire Studios) – Studio Band Image, Image of me and Hannah at Seed Sound Opening