He's pretty much right on what he says IMO. It may not even be stealing whole melodies or lyrics and sub-consciously thinking they're your own melodies; 'unoriginality' can come in more subtle forms. I've listened to tracks that have certain drum fills or ideas that later pop up in my own works accidentally.
All the music I've made - I can go as far as saying the whole unique style that defines my music - is undoubtedly entirely created out of the cumulative experience I have of listening to music by different people, who have in turn each been influenced by music they've heard throughout their lives themselves. This cycle goes on - everyone is inspired by what they've heard before, and the cycle stops at the first person who ever was inspired to create sound, hundreds of thousands of years ago.
It shows in the music I like to listen to. When I was young I used to love playing video games, and almost all video games come with music. I never really cared much for music before I started making it but sometimes, a game would have a song that would have a particularly 'in-your-face' melody, rather than subtle background tunes. I'd like this one and go back to it to listen to it again. When I began searching for music on the internet, I'd never download the ambient tunes, thrashy metal tunes or progressive house tunes. I'd always go for the ones with a catchy, prominent main melody.
Consequently, all of my music has very 'in-your-face' melodies. My music always has a clear foreground melody that's easy to remember, with all the background instruments dedicated to making the foreground melody sound good and more pronounced. On the other hand, my friend who also makes music was more into film music. He'd listen to a lot of film music during films (duh), and even casually on YouTube or on his way to/from school. What's the result? His tracks are more subtle and professional, with counter-melodies going on in the background and many bars of music dedicated entirely to building up a certain mood, just like a good film score would.
Another interesting observation is that the only reason that we have such a diverse and sophisticated society now is purely because of this cycle of creativity. Interestingly enough, we actually don't have much more brain-power than, say, a chimpanzee. Our genes are disturbingly similar to theirs. If you throw a baby human in the wild and it somehow survives and grows up there without any human intervention, it'll act roughly just as cleverly as a chimpanzee would.
The only reason we're sporting our smartphones while our chimp buddies are still hitting rocks with each other is because we as humans have that extra bit of intelligence to pass on our knowledge and get inspired from our predecessors. Over many thousands of years we've been getting ideas from our predecessors to create new things and passing on what we learn, building up a collective body of knowledge that forms the world we live in today.
We may seem leagues cleverer than all the animals in the world, but that's because when we're born we're taught how to communicate, how to walk, what foods we should and shouldn't eat, and so on. Eventually we go to school and get more knowledge hammered into us like basic maths and grammar. School slowly starts specialising into more detailed knowledge as we grow older and choose our career, that then branches us out into jobs that keep humans functioning. We get our own kids and undoubtedly teach them how to be a functioning human in society too, and the cycle repeats for them. And we're getting more sophisticated with each generation due to the combination of different ideas that we sub-consciously gather from the world around us.
So yeah, everything is a remix for a reason. If everything wasn't a remix and every human doesn't learn/get inspired from his predecessors, we'd be the ones hitting rocks with each other.
Hope I haven't digressed too much from audio haha.
