The Napster Split Is Happening Again, Except This Time It's Hollywood

Harmony Korine — the guy who made Kids and Spring Breakers and generally operates in a frequency most studios won't tune to — has a game studio now, folded into whatever new entertainment-adjacent thing is reshaping the industry from the edges. File this under: significant.

The Napster split is the right frame for what's happening. When Napster hit, you had two kinds of musicians. One kind saw the signal — that distribution was broken, that the relationship between artist and audience was about to be renegotiated whether the labels wanted it or not — and figured out how to move inside that new gravity. The other kind sued their fans. Metallica sued their fans. And then spent the next decade watching the thing they'd tried to kill become the floor everyone else built on.

Hollywood is at that exact moment right now. Some people are reading the shape of what's coming and getting in front of it. Some are going to spend the next decade in discovery on lawsuits that won't bring anything back.

The tells are in who's moving. It's not the studios. It's not the executives. It's the directors who were already operating outside the frame — the ones who made weird things for people who wanted weird things — and now they have game studios and AI tools and the infrastructure to distribute directly to the people who would watch whatever they made anyway.

That's the split. Not "industry versus artists." The industry doesn't have a unified position and neither do artists. It's people who understand that the pipe changed versus people who are still arguing about the pipe.

Some of them will make things nobody could have made before. Some of them will get a settlement check in 2031.