I arrived quite late so it was really great that Ana Rita (from WHY Portugal) came to the airport to pick me up and help me get to the apartment (soon to be home). My big suitcase looked huge compared to her tiny car but we managed to fit everything into it. We arrived at the apartment and it was great! As I was looking around there, I was glad the „moving in“ process is done and I don’t have to do that ever again! :D To my surprise, almost all the staircases in Lisbon (and maybe in Portugal) are really steep and narrow. It was so funny to see that the width of my suitcase was almost the same as the width of the staircase. But moved in I was, and I was glad!
  
On the left you can see where my new home is.

The next day I walked around the town in the morning to see the area I was living in and in the afternoon was the time to get to know the transportation system, because Lusitanian Music Publishing office, where I was headed, was in a different part of the town called Benefica.

Outside of my new office.

Sooo.. the bus schedule is an interesting thing. In Estonia you can plan your life around it and be everywhere at the right time and in Portugal the schedule seems to be an advisory thing. You go to the bus stop and hope that the bus will come and if it didn’t come, just wait for the next one. There is no point on taking a different bus, just relax and wait! No rush!

The beautiful Lisbon.

So what is Lusitanian Music Publishing and why did I come here to intern?
As the company name says, Lusitanian is a company that specializes in music publishing. They make sure that the artists and composers that they are working with have the proper representation and help them to get their music out there. From the perspective of a music supervisor or a marketing agency they are a ‘one-stop-shop’ for licensing music.
Because there is no schools nor other good programs to learn the ‘ins and outs’ of music business, especially music publishing I just had to apply for the internship and I am sooo glad I did! I love it here, in Portugal, and the people I work with are very open to teach me everything they know and also learn with me.

Interning in Lusitanian Music Publishing is great for understanding the music business. I get to help out with different types of things. For example when there was a festival I helped with the research to find the most useful delegates for the company and the artists. I have helped to prepare a new contract with a sub-publisher, fill the metadata sheets with right information, gathered information about their artists, updated the wordpress website and helped to set up an online store. Meanwhile I’ve also got to join interesting meetings with all kinds of business partners, attend a songwriting camp, have been helping to find the right songs for synch and got to see how music supervisors communicate with a music publishing company like Lusitanian.