In no particular order and by no means probably that coherent, some interesting things happened in music this week.

First of all we experienced some nice recombinant culture in action and how good the final, unexpected result can be received and quickly spread through t’internet. I’m talking about Dizzee Rascal and Florence performing at the Brits. We saw two artists, who have recently covered two old dance tracks perform a duet live that mashed the both of them up.

Now this is a potentially a royalties nightmare I guess but they managed to get it up on iTunes within 5 hours of the performance finishing. Well done. It also appears to be unofficially up on Youtube. Here it is.

The other closely related news wasn’t just that Lady Gaga won a heap of awards this week, she is proving to be a bit of an expert when it comes to the business side of digital as well as promotion. Here’s an extract from the Wall Street journal highlighting why Lady Gaga gets it:

“Lady Gaga’s towering digital sales, almost all of them iTunes downloads, only tell part of the story. In fact, much of Gaga’s audience got her music for free, and legally. They have listened to free streams—by the hundreds of millions—on YouTube and the other online services that Gaga currently leads, according to research firm BigChampagne. On MySpace, Gaga has had 321.5 million plays. By contrast, singer Susan Boyle tallied only 133,000 plays, despite scoring the No. 2 selling album of 2009.

Gaga isn’t giving it away for nothing—musicians typically earn fractions of a penny each time a song is streamed on Yahoo, for instance. While most artists stand to profit more from high-margin CD sales, being embedded across the Web can pay dividends in exposure and the loyalty of fans”

So where did Dizzee, Florence et al miss a trick? Well kudos for getting it up on iTunes but they didn’t close the loop and get it on the web first guiding people to said iTunes. They just didn’t learn from Chris Brown’s success piggy backing on the back of the now famous JK wedding entrance. Apparently digital sales jumped from 3,000 to 50,000 in the first week as a result of just advertising it on the content.

Dizzee and Florence

Chris Brown

The moral of the story? Don’t try and control it, feed it.