If you want your fans to be able to remix, mash, and recreate your music, you could adopt new remix-friendly digital distribution formats, or even give people your work as a GarageBand file. Of course, for maximum flexibility there’s a centuries-old technology that’s even better: notation.

Using Sibelius, the Pat Metheny Group has put its new album-length work The Way Up online as notation. With Sibelius’ Scorch plug-in (Mac/PC), you can view the whole score and listen to MIDI playback. Software notation was apparently critical through PMG’s whole creation process, too. Of course, if you’re a Sibelius user you can easily do the same thing with one-button Web output. (Finale does this, as well, but doesn’t offer controls over what viewers can do with the file, which in Sibelius lets you sell your music if you like.) Hal Leonard publishes many of its scores online for pay-per-download sales on Sheet Music Direct. Non-musicians have completely ignored digital notation distribution in all the focus on digital audio, but I’d love to see more of this.