Lana Del Rey’s Saturday Night Live appearance was rightly derided as a cringeworthy performance by an undercooked artist, clearly shoved too soon onto too a stage she wasn’t ready for. But underneath all the backlash was something laudable: SNL taking a risk with its musical guest.

Though that risk didn’t pay off for Lana Del Rey—not by a long shot—it did for the late-night variety institution. For the first time in what feels like ages, water-cooler talk (now represented by trending topics and blog post titles) was centered around SNL. Everybody and their mother had seen the performance, and they all had an opinion about it.

Despite its edgy, irreverent past, recent SNL has too easily slipped into formula in recent years, parading the same political impressions and running characters into familiar situations as long as they’re guaranteed to produce a few chuckles of recognition. But just as this season has produced a few bona fide highlights by subverting that safe comedic approach (one, not coincidentally, is Kristin Wiig’s controversy-referencing Lana Del Rey impression), the music bookers seemed to have learned from the LDR experiment.

Over the last few weeks, the show has shown a renewed willingness to take risks. In the three episodes following a post-LDR break, SNL has filled the musical slot with back-to-back-to-back performances by young artists farther removed from pop stardom than they’re usually prepared to venture. Bon Iver now has a Grammy to add to his Kanye-approved mainstream cred, sure, but Karmin has little more than a few smirking novelty white-girl raps racking up hits on YouTube, and Sleigh Bells practically come straight off the front page of Hipster Runoff.

Booking unpredictable guests lends the program some much-needed hipness while throwing back to its live-so-anything-can-happen roots, but an unforgiving sound mix and no-frills stage setup often means budding artists’ first introduction to a wider audience can be unflattering. Sleigh Bells, for instance, delivered a tepid performance without their usual smoke-machines and deafening noise-pop approach, while the less said about Karmin the better.

Still, Saturday Night Live’s stage carries an inherent prestige and it’s nice to see the producers lending it a wider array of musicians than whoever’s at the top of the charts. If you group SNL with its late-night brethren, however, it’s late to the game. With The Roots as its house band and Jonathan Cohen as its music booker, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon has reinvigorated the television music performance (enough to justify its very own top 10 list in our year-end coverage).

Often booking acts for their first TV appearance, Fallon has managed to keep performances fresh, grabbing young, exciting artists just as they’re about to break, and often sharing in their hype. In turn, a younger, typically internet-fuelled generation of artists has been willing to grace a TV stage. But Fallon has also proven adept at tying on-air content into internet extras, with artists often playing extra, exclusive songs to be uploaded separately.

It’s certainly paid off. In early 2011, Billboard pegged the show’s website at 511,000 unique visitors per month, a number that just continues to rise. Other shows, such as Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Conan, have employed similar strategies, with Conan even debuting a new video for Pitchfork-favourites Girls on their official website. If the blogs are filled with new content from their TV brands alongside things like Pitchfork TV, that’s an essential outlet to reach that all-important 18 to 25 demographic.

Even though the concept of “live TV” continues to weaken in influence and stature, you have to hand it to late night shows for finding a way to keep television musical performances relevant well into the year 2012.