The most often-repeated thing said about The Velvet Underground is Brian Eno’s quip that the band didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one started a band.

You won’t hear that line in Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground, nor will you see a montage of famous faces talking about their vast influence. You won’t even really hear a fairly full Velvet Underground track until nearly an hour into the two-hour film.

Instead, Haynes, the reliably unconventional filmmaker of Carol, I’m Not There and Far From Heaven, rejects a traditional treatment of the Velvets, a fitting approach considering the uncompromising, pioneering subject. His movie, which premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival, is, like the Velvets, boldly artful, boundless and stimulating. You sense that even Lou Reed would be pleased by how The Velvet Underground refuses the obvious.

“I didn’t need to make a movie to tell you how great the band is,” Haynes said in an interview. “There were a lot of things I was going to be like: OK, we know this. Let’s get right to how this happened, this music, where these people came from and how this miracle of this group of people came together.”

The Velvet Underground, which Apple will release in theaters and on its streaming platform Oct. 15, plumbs little-seen footage and features a host of rare interviews, including founding member John Cale (who describes the band as striving for “how to be elegant and how to be brutal”), Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers and an early disciple, and Jonas Mekas, the late pioneering filmmaker who filmed The Velvet Underground’s first ever live performance in 1964 and to whom the film is dedicated.

The Velvet Underground is most singular in how it resurrects the 1960s downtown New York art scene that birthed and fermented the group. Haynes patiently traces the fertile downtown landscape of Warhol’s Factory, the explosion of queer New York and how Lou Reed and the Velvets were turned on by acts like the Ramones or the experimental drone music of La Monte Young. Art, avant-garde film and music collide. The documentary, more than anything, is a revelatory portrait of artistic crosspollination.

“You really felt that coexistence and the creative inspiration that was being swapped from medium to medium,” says Haynes, who notes such localized hotbeds now seem extinct, a victim of a digital world. “I crave that today. I don’t know where that is.”

The Velvet Underground is Haynes’ first documentary. Previously, he’s turned to deliberately artificial fictions of great musicians. His Velvet Goldmine was a glam-rock fantasia of David Bowie. In I’m Not There, rather than attempt the impossible task of finding an actor for Bob Dylan, he cast seven.

“When I was doing research on the Bowie of Velvet Goldmine or all the Dylans of I’m Not Here, you come across the real thing,” says Haynes. “I always felt like if I’m going to re-create this in a fiction form, I better do something different with it. So you’re not comparing it with the real thing, apples to apples. You’re in a different language, putting it in a different context and the frame is visible.”

Haynes never met Reed, who died in 2013. But he saw him a few times at events like the Whitney Biennial (“I was too scared,” he says). And Reed gave his permission to use “Satellite of Love” in Velvet Goldmine. Laurie Anderson, Reed’s widow and a filmmaker, endorsed Haynes directing the film, and other estates, like Andy Warhol’s, were supportive.

Footage by Warhol, the only one to previously really document the Velvets, is laced throughout the film. In split screen, the band members’ screen tests for the Factory (usually seen as still photographs) play at length, with Reed or Cale staring provocatively out at you.

“The only film on them is by one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. That’s so rare and weird. There is no traditional coverage of the band playing live. There’s just Warhol films,” says Haynes. “We just have art within art within art to tell a story about great art.”

In a key comment on one of the most controversial issues regarding the Mechanical Licensing Collective, the U.S. Copyright Office issued regulations and best practices which included the guideline that the initial distribution of unmatched mechanical royalties by market share not occur for at least five years—not the minimum three-year period as stated in the Music Modernization Act.

What’s more, in making its recommendation, the Copyright Office said the clock counting down the five-year period should not start ticking until the MLC’s claim portal—which will give rights owners the ability to search through unmatched songs and claim those they own so that they can be paid the royalties for plays of those songs—is up and fully functioning with all of its tools. So far, the MLC apparently only has a beta version of the claim portal.

Furthermore, the Copyright Office stated in its guidance that even at the 5-year period, the MLC should apply relevant criteria to determine whether the first distribution should be further deferred.

The MLC was created by the Music Modernization Act (MMA) to collect mechanical royalties from digital services and create a database matching recordings to rights owners. It is also tasked with collecting the right ownership information for each song and maintaining a database so that the correct rights owners and songwriters receive proper payments.

Before the MLC was created and launched on Jan. 1 2021, this process was handled by the digital services and their consultants and resulted in some $424.3 million in unmatched royalties. Those funds have since been turned over to the MLC for distribution. The MLC must first try to match those royalties with the rightful owners of those songs, and it has three years to do so, according to the MMA. After that, if the correct rights owners can’t be identified, those funds are eligible for distribution by market share, a mechanism instilled in the MMA statute. The Copyright Office guidelines specifically address this issue.

Since the major publishers typically have the most market share and yet also have the best systems to insure that their songs are not unmatched, indie songwriters and publishers complained that the majors would be the beneficiary of such a distribution at the expense of indie songwriters.

In response to those worries, publishers have repeatedly noted that the law says the MLC may distribute those royalties after three years—not that the MLC has to distribute the unmatched black box monies. Meanwhile, the MLC itself has said it will exhaust all avenues to get the royalties to the rightful owners, including waiting a longer period, if necessary, before considering making a market share distribution.

Now, the Copyright Office has weighed in with a recommendation that likely insures the first distribution of the black box monies accumulated before the creation of the MLC won’t be distributed until five years after the claiming portal is operational.

This is how the Copyright Office puts it in its newly-issued regulations for the MLC: “The Office believes this minimum fixed extension is advisable in light of the MLC’s understandable need for a multiyear ramp-up period, the claiming portal not yet being available, and time needed to educate copyright owners about the existence of the MLC and the blanket license so they know to come forward to register and claim. Additionally, the MLC has stated that DSP reporting of pre-2021 unmatched usage ‘contain[s] in excess of 1.3 terabytes and nine billion lines of data,’ signifying that there is much for the MLC and copyright owners to work through in attempting to match and claim, and ample time should be provided to do so.”

Three songwriter organizations that are usually aligned on issues—the Songwriters Guild of America; the Music Creators of North America; and the Society of Composers and Lyricists—applauded the Copyright Office on this point.

The main worry of these organizations is the fact that the MLC board includes 10 publishers and only four songwriter publishers. Because the 10 publishers are among the bigger publishers in the industry, they have a conflict of interest if they recommend a market share distribution, the three organizations and other indie songwriters allege, since they would likely be a beneficiary of such a dispersion of funds.

“Most notably, the Office did not address the inherent dangers of conflicts of interest present on an MLC board with ten music publishers (including all of the major global conglomerates) and only four songwriter-composers,” reads the statement released by the groups.

“Remedying that dangerous and exceptionally unfair construction of the MLC board, which runs contrary to the traditions of nearly all other nations, is high on the legislative agenda of America’s independent songwriters, composers and lyricists,” Songwriters Guild of America president and songwriter Rick Carnes added in a statement. “We’ll be addressing that issue presently.”

The Biden administration confirmed Thursday that it recognizes Claude Joseph as acting prime minister of Haiti and said it would help the Haitian National Police investigate the assassination of President … Click to Continue »

Members of four major engineering associations in Florida have convened to come up with potential post-Surfside recommendations for the Legislature, including whether the state should require mandatory reinspections of tall … Click to Continue »

Decorative lawn boulders and gravel soon won’t be the only rock occupying the grounds of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The Northeast Philadelphia groundskeeping company’s industrial chain-link-fenced lot on State Road … Click to Continue »