The Media In Practice: Work Experience

I mentioned earlier that when looking for a career in the music industry it's very important to get as much experience as possible and make contacts along the way, so here I'm going to discuss the work experience I did a couple of years ago for Drowned In Sound (DiS).
Since getting work in the music industry is all about who you know, not what you know, I used the one contact I had at the time to get myself a week of work experience with DiS in London. It was actually a fairly standard 9 to 5 (well, 10 to 6) job in an office, which I really enjoyed. I know a lot of people looking for jobs in the media are after something that involves a lot of travelling or varied hours, but to me a 9 to 5 job in an office in which I get to listen to and analyse music all day is perfect.
As it's a very small business of (at the time) roughly 5 staff I got to work closely with everyone there and see what it was their job entailed. The woman who dealt with press for both the record label and the website was especially helpful and allowed me to observe and help out with her jobs. I got to see how she went about placing adverts in magazines, writing press releases and speaking personally to members of the press to hlp publicise the artists DiS was promoting that week.
I was also given the chance to write several news stories for the website and was helped by the main writer to make sure they were written in a style that would both appeal to their readers and get all the necessary information across.
Spending that week working at a real record label and seeing the way things were run was really useful for me and I'm looking to get some more experience this summer.