Issue 13.07 of Wired has a brief essay from the author William Gibson regarding the future of music and the impacts of remixing in particular:

“Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Todays audience isnt listening at all – its participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”

Read it. It will make you smarter. Trust me.

Thank you to BoingBoing for the link.