This video is deranged. Enjoy. I've also spent like a year on it. So now that it's out of my system, maybe I can get to some of the other music. But I promise you, I had to get this out of my system.
This is almost like yhe van life girl. This video should get alot of attention because it exposes alot of stuff that has been exposed by other youtubers. You did a great job also that company has been linked to doing stuff like this for safe marketing influencers to sell and advertise for companies. Good job man been watching for so long i cant remember.
This may be best video you've ever done. I'm grateful you've exposed this. I haven't yet put my finger on it, but this is some evil and sinister stuff.
This type of investigative video is so fascinating to me, and doubly so when it’s this subject. If you haven’t seen it already I’d recommend watching “The nightmare videos of children’s youtube” Ted Talk, it’s by a guy named James Bridle. It explores what I’m pretty sure is happening here, what with the content farming and the millions of bots and the gibberish comments that are likely toddlers being left with an iPad unattended. Truthfully the answer is probably nothing more than “it’s for money”, and that’s obviously fine! Let them make money! But I think people, myself included, find that the soulless nature of it all is pretty sinister lol. Great video Grady!! I hope you feel better having passed on your personal Ringu curse lmao
Why on earth did I just spend 30 minutes of the only life I've got, watching a guy who I've never seen another video of, talking about a TikTok girl band I've never heard of, who sing in a genre of music I'd never listen to? The fact that I actually finished this video is as much a mystery to me as Taylor Red is to you.
I dislike country music so much (& my Mother is from Saskatchewan!) that if I go into a store that is playing loud country, I have to take a deep breath and power shop so I can get in and out as quickly as possible before my soul starts going down a sadness spiral... and I was recommended this video and watched it until the last second
They did a small church concert in my town in about 2013. They were called The Red Roots. They were a Christian band, and the vibes I got was that their family was very controlling and maybe was forcing them to sing and perform.
That's what worried me the moment he mentioned their dad being their manager and them missing out on college. He's been making this a career for them since they were kids and if he's the one whose still controlling everything and he's realized the cash he can make off this weird baby content, everything makes way more sense to me. I hope the girls are at least able to enjoy their "success" at least...
I watching this video right after watching the Duggar family Duggar documentary on Prime where Jill talks about how she received 0 money from the shows and it went all to the dad. These twins seem robotic. I think you might be right.
WELL, I'm about to drag you back to it. This is called "fetishist farming". Most of their videos cater to niche fetishes like balloon popping, food fights, sensory play, triplets, redheads etc. It's genius, really because they can totally claim they had no idea....but it's the ENTIRE point. There are MANY accounts like theirs.
Boosting because you're exactly right. I just watched another TikTok creator do a video explaining so much weird content as being fetish-specific. It would be so interesting to know how those sisters came to understand that market, and how they decided to get involved in it. Maybe a savvy manager got ahold of them and explained all the money they could be making. What a departure from their Baptist Country roots.
It's so comforting to watch someone else going down an absolutely pointless rabbit hole that will never have a satisfying conclusion. I'm also invested now lol
My boyfriend and I have a running theory about this type of robot like content. It feels VERY heavily geared towards children. Bright colors, easy to understand even if there are no words spoken, high energy that is not normal in day to day life. Kids eat it up. This is where the views come into play because kids are the ones sitting scrolling for hours on end, but not old enough to fully engage in the content with comments or to seek them out on other platforms like twitter (which kids typically don’t have). Kids content is also really marketable and brand partnership worthy. It just helps to answer the question of why the engagement never matches the view counts. This is true on a lot of channels and accounts that make this child like content. Kids watch but don’t engage as often
@@DonnaDoveWinters Those demographics can't go to Twitter easily and cancel UA-cam by tomorrow. I also doubt their parents would understand that this is creepy fetish material and would find no reason to. This type of thing was exposed nearly a decade ago, it definitely seems it's finding a resurgence.
Totally! When he showed the top UA-cam creators they were among the ones watched by kids. Gross cause some of the content is giving me fetish vibes like 5 minute crafts and kids are watching this.
this also explains why younger non english viewers would watch them too. less language, more visual. i would imagine more visual content could translate to more viewers worldwide, without a language barrier to separate them. and obvs the fetishy aspect probs plays into to their viewership too. but sadly fetish/kids content have had a disgusting blend as of lately.
I love this kind of video, where someone I’ve never heard makes a well-produced deep dive into a subject that they are compelled by. A fascinating glimpse into an obscure phenomenon and someone else’s brain. Great job!
as a Brazilian who's utterly uninsterested in American country music I'm completely clueless as to why youtube's algorithm would recommend this vid to me. but I'm so glad it did! I was hooked the entire time. looking forward to part 2 if there's one!
I thought the same thing but then i remembered being a kid in a strict house and it did nothing for me, and i was a kid/teen before the internet I still saw porn from the kid that had the hidden magazine in the woods, still heard and saw shit that my parents didn't want me to, and when my very strict father died when i was 11 i quickly went down hill and by 18 i would consider myself a drunk and budding drug addict, which became a full blown drug addict by 21/22 and was hooked on pain pills for 15+ years. Not telling anyone how to parent but with my daughter i told her anything she wanted to know and didn't make it scary, didn't try to make her think what i wanted (my parents always told me that drugs and alcohol will kill you or at least put me in jail without telling me why people would even think about doing them, so when i tried them i knew they just lied to me and treated me like a dumb kid) i told my daughter the truth as best i could and explained things through my experiences, shes only 13 but so far, so good. Shes funny, caring, stands up for others, hasn't touched drugs or alcohol, tells me when her friends do, and the most important thing to me that she does, that i was too afraid to do as a kid is, she comes to at least one of us to talk about important things in her life, if not both of us, and thats all i really want from her is to feel comfortable enough to talk to us if she needs help. And im not some hippy dippy, free range, blah blah blah, im old school in a way, i have anger issues due to my past that she helps keep in check, ive punished/yelled at her but ive always taught her if she feels im in the wrong then challenge me and state your case, if im wrong and she makes a good argument then i go over it with her and apologize, also that i have very little control over her now and in a few years ill have absolutely no control of what she does or who she becomes so its my job to make sure at 18 she can leave if she wants to and she'll be prepared for the world ahead of her, which includes me talking to her at 4yrs old about kid nappings and sexual creeps, explaining as best i could why these people do these things, what to look out for, as a women she has a way higher chance of being attcked, etc. Never held anything back but when i told her about something new it wasnt a 5 minute convo, it was 30/60 mins right then and there, and also reminders and new information i might have forgotten or described wrong. Shes only 13 and it could go to shit next week but im proud of the young lady she is, and positive about the amazing woman she'll become. Sorry this was long but i gush over my daughter when children are brought up because i can't believe a loser like me that fucked up 2/3rds of his life by the time she was born could be 33.3% involved in helping a beautiful soul like hers flourish (her mother 33.3%, me 33.3% and my daughter herself is the other 33.3% because kids are sponges but not all of them learn the same, like me who was a total fuck up for 30 years)
If you dont want to read that whole comment i guess the bottom line of it was kids outside of your home will show/teach/say/do/etc your kid things they don't have access to or knowledge of so the way i looked at it was, I'd rather teach her how to use these things that are everywhere and not going anywhere, including teaching her about all the bad so that when she is shown things by others she knows how to handle herself. Basically i love that little shit and im proud of who she is right now. If you dont teach them, someone else will.
Hey Grady, I actually worked at one of their concerts as a video switcher. We weren't allowed to record so my job was mainly for the in house screens. As you said in the video, Taylor Red was playing for an entirely elderly crowd. It was interesting too as they were introduced as social media famous, for a not social media savvy group. If you were wondering, they only played covers of country songs
This group has been showing up on TikTok for me FOREVER and the vibes have been bugging me this entire time, it’s been YEARS at this point and I’m so glad someone picked up the same energy I did. Thank you so much for taking a look into this!
They also named their band in a perfect way to be *impossible* to search for anyone posting raw concert footage because the same tags and keywords that someone may use to post would be completely swamped with Taylor Swift, Red content.
@@simplesimply3753 lol I highly doubt the sponsors thought they were Taylor Swift haha, that would be a big brand deal there’s no way they could overlook that.
I thought that straight away but for the opposite reason. If people type in Taylor Red, looking for Taylor Swift's album Red, they could come across their channel and subscribe. Especially since they're a country band, they might have been hoping on some of Taylor's fans who love her old country style. They will have been disappointed but I know I've subbed to channels before based on one video then never watched anything else of theirs again but just never bothered to unsub. It'd explain their high number of followers to low numbers of views ratio, to some degree anyway.
Grady, you're not crazy. Their DAD is behind all of this. Find the dad and you will know how he orchestrated all of this since the beginning. He's also behind the LIVE ONSTAGE business.
Too bad "wear yellow if you need help" won't work since they've probably done any absurdity possible. Plus they don't engage with comments so probably not allowed onto social media. Shit, this could be real bad. And how many more other cases of this kind of slavery that we haven't heard about..
My mom used to buy Insta comments/likes/followers from a weird website called Fiver (she wasn't even trying to be an influencer, she just liked the validation even though it was fake... I also think she was trying to get attention from a celeb she had a crush on, LONG STORY). But yeah the comments and engagement of these videos looks a LOT like that. Same weird spammy comments, and inflated fake engagement. They probably intended to do a 'fake it until you make it' thing, but kinda like Grady said, ended up realizing the algorithm responded to fake viewership and actually dragged some real viewership in, which generated real money... Something they weren't really making before. Being real "artist" like Travis Scott did that, and actually found real success from it. I feel indifferent as its probably more bands/singers than any of us would think got their start doing crap like this. That being said, I don't like the slightly fetlshy vibe being mixed with something clearly made for children. That... Is actually off-putting.
Of course. Anytime you see a very young family "band" on the pop "music" scene, it's always as a result of the parents. See: the jackson 5, billie eilish, Taylor swift, all the rest...
This scared the crap out of me because it gave me the same exact disturbed feeling I get when I see the weird "kids content" my little nephew watches. There is a lot of content out there that's different than what I watched as a kid... something's off about it... you're onto something for sure.
The very visual/non-verbal focus also opens up the markets they can reach: literally anyone who has eyes, no need to speak the same language or any yet for that matter:)
this, so true.. I really wonder whatever happened? Or why did companies even bother back then to produce e.g. cartoons with a proper story? I already felt that same weird way when the switch to 3d-animated cartoons happened. Most of all I wonder whose parents would ever allow their kid to watch this kinda tiktok brain-melting, cringy garbage? It physically pains me.
As someone who doesn't follow country music and has never seen a Grady Smith video in my life, I followed the drama surrounding a tumblr girl band that was called the Tramp Stamps quite passionately, and assumed this video would be about another funny industry plant. What a weird rabbit hole: I loved it.
Now what I found odd is that I hadn't heard about the Tramps stamps at all, yet found three channels i regularly follow who had talked about the tramp stamps and I just missed happened to not see their videos. I think when it comes to the algorithm stuff, all of it makes sense if we had more of an honest explanation of how it chooses what it thinks we want to watch.
This video was about so much more than Tayler Red. It's kind of a huge relief to know that there are so many other people that are creeped out by the weirdness of those tiktoks. Thank you.
I am weirded out by why people watch them. I keep getting crap like that in my tiktok feed and can only stop it by blocking the channel. Which takes longer than it does to skip to the next.
I am genuinely not understanding the appeal in the short looping videos in general. I think its my brain though. I have tried to engage with it and i find it just shows me crap videos and the ones i like are not worth seeing 100's of crap. I had the same feeling with vine. I just dont get it.
@@nate567987 well, that's why there are parents, and if the parents are not doing their job. Then it's not society's job to be obligated to safeguard the world for them. If the parent is harming the kid remove the kid and put them in foster care.
After watching this great story be told and now reading the comments, I find it weird how many people (like myself) said this video was recommended to them apparently by the YT algorithm. We are not country music lovers, do not regularly search for country music artist and had never seen one of Grady’s videos before, but YT kept pushing this video to us. That just strikes me as kind of suspicious given the nature of this video topic.
Well, I for one watch exposes a lot abs tons of music videos so it’s not outlandish that a music channel that does exposes would be recommended to me despite the genre. It’s not that deep. I hate country music, but finding out another industry Plant group exists. It’s fascinating to me.
Balloon popping is the first BIG red flag. For some reason, this is a very popular fetish, and is something many sex content creators use to draw attention to their pages because it is guaranteed to pass content restriction checks- nothing graphic or overtly sexual about balloon popping, so it’s a great way to get around those pesky community guidelines, and reach your target audience for your _other_ content. Twins and triplets is also another fetish thing. And redheads. And food stuff. And also the gasping/shocked stuff. Really hitting all the usual marks. 😬
It feels like grooming content for some reason. That or the kind of child-adjacent fetishey content that weird adults would consume. Both? Idk it creeps me out
Don’t have any kids. If I ever do I’m gonna do my darnedest to keep them from screens until adulthood. Might as well give them hard drugs as let them have a cmeraphone
Y’all must have never had any fun. I assume y’all also never watched three stooges or icarly. I have 2 kids and they like this type of content it’s honestly mind numbing but so was high school musical for the 15th time my parents had to watch it. Children don’t have refined tastes that doesn’t mean they never will
I’m in marketing and I think you nailed it when you said they’re getting attention from sponsors because they have a huge following. If I had to guess, I’d say the weird content is a means to make money. The money helps them buy fake followers (which is cheap and easy to do.) They probably paid that promotion company to make them look legitimate. It’s all a well orchestrated hustle, most likely from some girls who tried to make it as musicians and failed. They figured out how to game the system.
It would seem so incredibly shallow to me if I was one of the sisters. The three of them have to be completely on the same page with this bizarre and lukewarm content. How long can they pursue making these soulless videos? Perhaps after Grady's expose we'll get some honesty.
They’re 100% named Taylor Red because of Taylor Swift’s album Red. They added the TV because of “Taylor’s Version” and it works because red was a country album! That way, people search Taylor red (meaning Taylor swift red) and find these girls instead. They can write TV for Taylor’s version or write country and keep finding these three.
edit: i was thinking of Taylor's song "...Ready for it" and confused the titles whoops. thanks @fullsunenthiast for pointing that out! original comment: And "wait for it..." is the name of another Taylor Swift song that people are on the lookout for, since it hasn't been re-released as a "Taylor's Version" yet. So any Taylor Swift fan seeing the name Taylor + "Wait for it..." is definitely going to click, or at least be confused for a minute.
Absolutely. Everything about them seems like they have a parent or manager that is pushing them. Like, cramming them down in people's throats until you have no choice but to choke them down.
My brother dated the one with short hair, Natalie, twice. It never worked out. They’re basically not allowed to date. I’ve heard them sing live in a church when they were still red roots. I had one of their CDs and my daughter loved it. I have pictures of them with my kids. In my opinion, they are 100% being controlled. And their voices are actually not good at all. That’s why there is no live footage
I disagree and think their live voices sound great, but I do agree that they're being controlled and that that probably has a lot to do with the way they're perceived by people who actually know them off the internet.
Is it their father that’s controlling or is it a situation where an agent/agency or producer exploits them and they think it’s the only way to make money?
Met these girls in 2016. They were absolutely normal and quite talented. I'm so confused right now with their content. I have a picture with them as well. This is just weird.
My only theory is they have a manager who's focusing on tiktok but is too old to know how to actually engage with it, so they use bots and algorithmic content instead of actually promoting music. Haven't finished the video yet so I'll see if I'm right
@@amberwingtundrawing776 i think the same, they signed to bad company or just that company actually want more viral/view so the band more known worldwide before doing the actual thing. Lol
I think they strategically chose Taylor red as their name because Taylor Swift has her album called Red and Taylor was once a country artist too. Like, Taylor is one of the biggest female artists in the game and Red was a huge success, that would mean people looking for Swift, would probably come across them. I think if they ever wanted to get rid of this it would be really easy to hide it under all of Taylor Swifts stuff.
Came here to say this. I think they chose that name so people who were looking for that album or that music, they’d get lost and find them accidentally.
It’s funny cuz I’ve been terrorized by these triplets, they always show up in my recommended everywhere. UA-cam, instagram, Snapchat, etc and I always wondered the same exact things he did 😂 so seeing this pop up in my recommended was so perfect.
This showed up on my feed and I'm not halfway through yet, but it feels like some sort of rabbit hole that would be covered by Nexpo, Night Mind or Nick Crowley. Maybe not an ARG but just one of those creepy tales of girls that are forced to make videos by some creep and you don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
I’m so glad you posted this. My husband is a Nashville producer and was contacted by Taylor Red to write a year ago or so. They ended up bailing, but my husband and I were both so weirded out by their content that I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out.
@@briannasusz just think, it's an AI. "I'm totally a normal person and I've seen them in real life." Meanwhile, any real people out there ever see them? 😆 All deepfakes 😅😆
I think the thing that feels weird is exactly why tiktok in general can be super weird. It's weird kid-targeted brain poison that is also mildly suggestive. It is so so weird.
Thank you for this random deep dive! I'm always fascinated by cases like this. As a professional Social Media manager, I can pretty much guarantee that the majority of views and followers on their accounts are fakes/bots, probably bought with the same money that pays for their well produced recordings and music videos. For influencers of their type, we usually say that an average of about 5-10% of engagement (of the total number of views) is normal. They seem to be ions away from that and their Twitter following is another indication that their legitimate followers are probably in the low 4 figures. This might seem innocent enough, but if they're using these fake numbers to score sponsors and partnerships with major brands, then that's actually a form of fraud. Let's hope that companies do their due diligence and have capable managers that can spot this before losing them a lot of money.
Honestly, I think you got it pretty spot-on - they wanted to market their music through social media initially, but then they just kinda fell into the weirdly profitable kid's content limbo and tought "well, fuck it, might as well"
I think they also paid for a lot of their views, followers and commentators on other platforms before randomly making it lucky on the UA-cam short algorithm.
I don't know if that explains all of it. I dont know we have an clear idea of the mindset or motivations of the girls or their managers or handlers (or even if that is part of it) or if they are knowing what about their content is consciously being done to manipulate the algorithm. I think this one is engaging people because you can't easily say "I see what is happening". I am going to try and see if i can ask a friend who used to work for a company that did that and see if she either can more confidently get what the deal is. Likely its the most boring answer though, Yet my brain still wants it answered.
A lot of people want to believe jibberish comments in other languages are just kids, but it's view bots and comment bots. They leave comments in tons of different languages often that font make sense. I think they bougtt almost all of their 10mil followers personally
These videos have a very strong content farm vibe. There are companies out there, mostly in Eastern Europe or Central Asia, that hire hundreds of people to stand around in a warehouse around dozens of sets and just produce content all day long. It's where you get all the 5-minute Craft clones from, for example. But you also get things like this, that is seemingly jibberish with no apparent value. They do that kind of content because it is quick and easy to make, requires minimal editing and you can make 20 of them in a day, so spending a month can fill a channel with content for over a year of several daily uploads. These companies sometimes run up to 200 channels and some of them have diamond play buttons numbering in double digits. The more you upload, the more views you get. The more views you get, the more money you get. Taylor Red is the first I've seen that definitely isn't a warehouse in Central Asia though, so I doubt they are part of a content farm network. They seem to be the rare case of someone copying the content farm formula and succeeding with it.
Yes! Another person who got it! Ahhgg I feel like someone else needs to do a real expose because I immediately put all the pieces together and you're covering two of them. Taylor Red is indeed a machine but it's powered by people. It's also just as much a front. What I will give them is its an insane blend of luck, aesthetic, a little bit of talent, the hard work of millions of people working in spam/content farms and a few powerful names to pull the strings, and dedication to working that damn algorithm. The luck is what really makes the algorithm work because all it takes is some tweaking to make big money wheh the starting product is three attractive red headed female triplets. That is a rare and powerful money making combination and they figured it out and made it work. And no Grady, they don't give a damn about being professional musicians anymore.
I find the entire process from content creation to how it is viewed to be completely odd and very sad. It's turning kids into zombies, which I'm sure is entirely the point.
im an eastern european and travelled literally the whole europe... I've never seen a content farm... Only in China and similar asian countries. Stop belittling usm
Watching their videos feels like the perfect manifestation of the empty internet theory. If they actually are just three sisters that have found a market for their fetishy, cringe shorts, more power to them I guess. You're not wrong though, the whole thing just feels off.
I am not on TikTok or Facebook and somehow knew about these girls and felt the same way. Disturbing "child friendly" fetish content that capitalizes on trends. I honestly had the thought they were computer generated at one point because of how odd their movements and behaviors were. Thank you for talking about this!
So help me but was only listening and not watching but when he described balloon popping, eating in weird ways my immediate thought was that these videos were for the creepers. Yes possibly also for the illiterate babies 😄 but largely for the weirdos
@@mamacito1795 Yeah it's absolutely tailored for both demographics. They are getting the creepers as well as the young kids whose brains are still pudding.
I don't know how UA-cam decided to show this to me but this was so compelling. One of the weirdest parts is that they haven't gotten any kind of legal action from Taylor Swift considering she has an album called Red.
I was thinking the same, not legal action just if that was the reason for their name. Another comment mentioned they changed name about the same time as Taylor guitar sponsored them (I have no clue, never heard of them, I'll keep listening to that red album by the other taylor though :)
Same but then I figured since UA-cam is promoting them that's why this was promoted to us and newer content be UA-cam doesn't really know what the content is just as long as it's got the names they want. It was a great video and I couldn't stop watching.
While it may seem that when they changed their name to Taylor Red the triplets were intentionally hitching their wagon to the star of Taylor Swift's "Red" album, their name WAS actually Taylor and their hair was already red. The synergy is almost absurd, but there you have it. It's like when Mattel sued the Barbi twins for trademark infringement. It was "obvious" that they were profiting off their synergy with the Barbie doll, but their name WAS actually Barbi and they actually were buxom blondes. Mattel lost that lawsuit.
Pretty sure that's not how copyrights work. You can't copyright or trademark a commonly used word like red, and Taylor is a name so again, can't be copyrighted. If they had called themselves Taylor Swift-Red, then the other singer would have a case.
@@aislingoharrigan7543 I'm sure you're right, it wouldn't hold up in court. But sometimes lawyers will threaten legal action in hopes the recipient wants to not go to court at all. Mostly joking though. Sorry :)
The short answer: They make way more money playing the algorithm than they ever would as a z-tier music act. Maybe if they can ever get away from the weirdos they're contracted to they'll change, but let's all be honest here: If we could make 4-5 figures a month popping balloons we'd do the exact same thing.
Lol half the reason I watched the whole video was to see if Grady would somehow inadvertently spill the beans so I could also stop my 9-5 grind and pop balloons, making hundreds of thousands of dollars each month
I will totally pop the shit out of some balloons for that kind of income. You can always create the art you love when you have the capital from doing the crap that is just for the money.
They are triplets. That's their cash in. Everyone would find it amusing 3 identical young atractive red hair girls doing inuendo things. Dressing in bright colors, having their hair done in three diferent ways, talking at the same time. Its true: is all obtain trough fetishist fishing. They can loose youth, become to old to do this things but... they would still be tripplets. So.. cashing!
So my best guess: they started out in music, but started doing the videos. The audience for their videos is vastly different than the potential audience for their music. The videos have quirky international silliness appeal (similar to the others you showed) and that audience wouldn't be interested in country music (other than some small percentage that gives them a try). So they are really leading two different lives - one in which they do videos for the sexy/silly/fetish appeal, and then are doing their tours and music in the other life. We normally think of these things having synergy and working together, but maybe they figured they need to keep them relatively separate so that the video part can be more successful.
This kind of content that they produce is EXACTLY the kind of thing my five-year-old nephew would watch on UA-cam, just endlessly jumping from one video to the next. I think you're onto the right idea with it being for kids who are just looking for something bright and distracting. Honestly it's such a weird, dark corner of the internet that gives me the creeps. Love seeing such a unique, different video approach from you. Really cool vid, great work!
@@johnindigo5477 excellent way of putting it. It is very reminiscent of those low-budget public access tv shows for kids, except with even less substance and theme. It's like those spider man Elsa videos, and the people who make them are weird as hell including these girls. They don't care about or even like kids, they have zero passion for it, they just happened to stumble into this gold mine of low effort kiddie content.
That was my take, it's no different then all those creepy videos of people playing with dolls, low quality content for four year olds. These girls don't even have that great of a hustle, they could be putting in a lot less work for the same result.
I cannot stop laughing. This entire video and situation is as hysterical as it is unnerving and confusing. It's like if the concept of 'uncanny valley' had a physical embodiment. The entire situation, from the fact that they are so pervasive in areas of the internet while simultaneously seeming like there is no evidence that they even exist, to the outlandishness of their content, the internet scrubbing... what the hell. I'm obsessed.
Either a legal situation (signed a contract/under threat), and/or some kind of artistic stunt - e.g. the little poppy videos. There are other strange internet phenomenon, this is probably the least of them. Another possibility is a weird kind of scam, a sort of catfishing where the original artists aren't aware they are being ripped off. That's unlikely but not impossible, and might partially explain the aversion to live music. OFC best way to know would be an actual interview. I'm not even sure if this video isn't some sort of publicity stunt. Anyways, weird stuff. 🤪
I feel like it mostly gets explained in the video - initially unpopular country band - follower inflation through bots - bizarre videos made for kids - getting views from said videos - artificially pumping out more of this brainless subhuman content. What I'm wondering about is why in the world did UA-cam themselves publicise them? That's what I find strangest of all.
The main mystery to me is the Susan tweet, based on your assertion that she rarely tweets (so I'm assuming she doesn't congratulate every channel passing milestones). The rest seems like J-idols with seedy management, exploiting teenagers' dreams of the stage.
I've never heard of you before, and I've never heard of these girls before... I am totally unimpressed with these girls, and never need to hear about them again. You, on the other hand, did an excellent job presenting this story and provided some solid entertainment that I'll never need to revisit lol.
I'm not from the US, I've never watched a country music related video before or listened to the music volutarily but now Taylor Red lives rentfree in my head too. Thank you.
Let me add a whole new level of weirdness to this whole situation. I came across your video as a result of somebody posting the link as a reply to a tweet by a parody account named "Christian Nightmares" in which they posted one of their short videos doing the whole rice thing. I initially didn't watch your video but read the comments and found the one where someone mentioned something about "fetish farming", did I screencap and posted it as a reply. Then sometime over night I noticed somebody replied to my reply by posting a link to this video.... Which I thought it was weird because that's where the comment came from. This morning I watched your video, which is absolutely fascinating and I'm glad I did, and I realized this reminded me of something else that I had run into a few times, a channel named Ratata and about which I had tweeted in the past for similar reasons as you. I found my original tweet and I went to post it in the tweet by Christian Nightmares as an example of something similar. But as I scrolled down older replies I noticed that the person who posted a link to this video on my reply had actually gone down almost all the replies and reposted the same link... No text, no comment, just the link to this video.... Even on replies that had a link to this video already... Almost as if someone had gone and automatically replied blindly. And then I saw it. I didn't noticed it at first but there it was.... The person posting the links to this video is named... Ben Taylor.
Taylor Red used to be my favorite band back when they were the Red Roots. I saw them live in a concert and bought all three of their albums. I still have all those tracks digitally even when they've all disappeared from the Internet. I've always been confused by their rebranding and their tick-tock stuff, and why they've never addressed why they deleted all their red roots music and content. Thank you for making this video and trying to answer some of these questions for them.
@@smsmsmsmsmsm It was! At first, when they rebranded as Taylor Red, I followed their music and Facebook page and it was fairly okay. But not too long after I remember the tic-toc algorithm putting them on my for-you page. I was like, what the heck?
That response seemed like a computer generated generic response sent to any one who responds to them. I bet if I sent them something I would probably get the same response,
This was a fascinating deep dive and I really admire your commitment to unearthing the truth to this story!! Also thank you for highlighting the rise in weird videos that are flooding these social media platforms - whether it’s fetishist, or creators throwing everything at the wall and hoping something breaks through the algorithm, it’s weird and unnerving
I think you hit the nail on the head- this shit is so lucrative. And yeah a lot of it is fetish content- the balloons, the messy food, the weird food combinations, the really specific hand gesturing- it’s fetish content.
I'm wondering, if these girls actually know what they're doing. Like.. They are always on camera all 3 of them, and their dad is their manager and behind the live production company selling their shows. Just a thought: The dad has been surfing on some unsavoury sites encountering this fetish material, noticing how popular it is. "Hey, I have three pretty young daughters, and a big part of this fetish stuff is youtube friendly if you exclude nudity from it. You can make money there.... hmmm... I could probably get my girls to step on some balloons and mess around with food on camera... GIRLS!! GIRLS COME IN HERE, I HAVE AN IDEA!..."
@@NobodysbbyYeah, the post claiming they may be controlled by their dad has me really creeped out. They seemed genuine and nice when I saw them perform live many years back. But they were teens. What if they want to be musicians and someone is making them do this fetish stuff to make money off them and the three girls think it’s a career move to get their band going? They had real musical talent (particularly one of them who played violin).
@@Andreamom001 I mean I see what your saying maybe it is the dad but we all thought the psychic twins were good people until slowly people realized they were con artists. I don't know but these girls just look dead in the eyes and their actions are very robotic. They don't look like they are ever actually having any fun. And he said they post 30-40 videos a day? I mean that's just weird no matter who or what is managing them. Whoever they are has a sinister side to them and in sure the girls are not aware if they are then I won't what other fetish related content they make that we are not aware of perhaps on other sites .
*My Theory:* They were hired by a content-farm-style company in maybe India or Indonesia, and that company is who is actually running the channel, while the girls just produce the videos at the company's direction. The reason they have so many followers with such little engagement is because their videos are designed to appeal to kids, so they're being watched on UA-cam Kids _where comments are automatically disabled._ That's my guess. Every time I see a channel with a ridiculous number of views or subscribers and almost no comments, it's always a channel that makes those exact kinds of videos aimed at kids, and every time I see a channel reuse and repost content, it's a content farm. Hiring a triplet country band would be a unique angle though. Never seen that before. And now I'm dying to know if I'm right!
I am from Indonesia, not into country music, but their shorts, well its like pushed into our (me and my kids) endless scrolls of yt shorts. Best I can do to particular types of short videos (many worse) that are --I think-- 'not of our cup of tea', is just tap that "Don't recommend channel" button.
Yea idk about that Sounds like they saw what gets trendy Copied it Got a bunch of money And never stopped I think they wanted to start as a legit band but since that brought nothing to the table they probably had their label or whoever in charge of their social media Start having them post to tiktok with those brain dead viral videos🎃
What I don't get, is why these "content farms" choose such an uber cringe worthy style for videos? And more baffling is why this uber cringe stuff gets views at all?
@@nancyneyedly4587 little kids Bright meaningless content that can stare at and drool over with no real thought Little kids are basically born with an iPad in their hand so ofc they’ll do the quick scroll content without thinking They just see “omg Elsa” “Omg bright colors” “woAh balloons” and keep watching
I think you are 100% correct on the UA-cam Kids thing. I'll tell you why. I come from a family who currently consists of many kids in the "mom can I watch UA-cam on your phone/ipad?"- age/phase. I'm the type of person who usually go hang out with the kids at family gatherings, when I feel like the adults become too loud or political (usually followed by comments like "Are you sure you wanna watch the kids while we sit here drinking and talking elections/jobs/tell the same story 16 times? You dont have to if you don't want to/but please do it so we can gossip without having to worry if our kids are clogging the toilet with towels, like last time" and "Aww, look at her, she is amazing with kids.. Anyway, so this bitch Patricia from work is totally BJ'ing the boss"). The kids often sit with each of their parents phones, and kind of "doom scroll" through "kid friendly" UA-cam shorts (Im rarely able to convince them to do anything else). The videos are often the exact same format: Bright pastel colors, 1.5 speed, no sound other than uptempo background music, "pranks", "challenges", foods and liquids, and unboxing toys. And sometimes have the weird fetish-element, too subtle for kids to notice. And these 3 redheads have popped up NUMEROUS times, and across all the "kids with devices" I've encountered the past year. When I ask any of the kids who the people in the shorts are, they have no idea/just kinda shrug. Unless its someone dressed as a Disney character.
This reeks of all the weird children's video stuff that got banned a few years back, but they've somehow managed to circumvent the restrictions. I would say your speculation that some creepy manager is controlling them to make all this content is incredibly likely. If we're to believe they are real individual humans with their own minds, maybe one of them will desert the others and come clean some day... Incredible rabbit hole reporting! Hope you make more like this
what your saying reminds me of another case of a "chiristan" tiktoker i think that may be likely many people out there are trying to use chiristany or many other religions to excuse terrible behavior but even if its not that this case is still strange
i thinks it's absolutely kids watching this weird type of short. That stuff was banned because it hid lots of horrible things in it. These videos are weird but innocent.
@@Xander1Sheridan Exactly. These videos are completely innocent, but they just FEEL so insidious because they use a lot of the same tactics and content style as those horrible videos.
Dude this is nuts, I was halfway through your video when I realized I have seen these girls live. My daughter even has a poster somewhere. I can confirm they’re actually decent live and they do have a good production. I saw them while visiting my grandfather in Texas. They played at a Dell Webb community center for a bunch of retiree’s.
Being a native Spanish speaker and knowing what international audiences like, I think that their content isn't targeted towards Americans at all. Many videos on Spanish UA-cam for instance, is flooded with cringey and juvenile content. For some reason, these videos always have millions of views with little explanation. It seems that Taylor Red just figured out that making cringey content for international audiences makes a lot more money than what one might think.
It seems to tap into the same algorithm of those strange, and inexplicably popular "baby" videos of poorly-animated Disney and Marvel characters interacting and dancing to strange music and sounds. It's the "baby with an iPad" syndrome: flooding the platform with pablum like this is purely view-mining from these naive and (likely foreign, as you point out) markets.
It makes way more sense in that light. I guess part of the uncanny aspect might be the same cultural barrier that makes Japanese game shows and commercials seem so bizarre to the rest of the world
Yup, I do think the content Taylor Red is doing is something that work yhe best for the non english audiences. All it requires is for you understand what is happening visually, so it removes a lot of barriers. I've also seen kids who don't yet know how to speak binging similar content. It's colorful, it's silly, it's strange. It's like dangling a set of shiny keys in the front of their eyes, with the difference they can quickly jump from one set of keys to other. Taylor Red, or who ever is behind them, is playing the algorithm game and is doing so very well. They've take the pages from the same play book as those Indian and Chinese UA-cam content farms, which push out similar content day after day. This whole thing is an enitrely self made problem for the social media platforms. In their quest of fast revolving contnent that creates endless revenue streams of advertisement money, they've created an eco system of this kind of mindless fluff.
I am so glad to see that other people are seeing how creepy their stuff is. This isn't the content people want, it is the content the platforms push at ALL of us no matter what our actually viewing habits may be.
This was fascinating to me. My vote is that they’re hired to be a social experiment for testing ideas and seeing what sells or attracts. Kinda conspiracy-ish, I know.
Holy shit. I've seen these weird videos and it never clicked with me. I moved to Hurley, MS like fourteen years ago and it's right next to Wade. These girls were all the rage in our little Pentecostal Movement when they started out. I'm pretty sure I actually have one of their CDs somewhere that I got when I went to hear them sing. I'm so glad I stuck this one out. I about damn keeled over when you revealed that part.
OK, I can confirm the Red Roots history. I live in South Mississippi where the girls are from. They used to perform at local churches and events here. We had them at a fall festival at the church I used to attend and I even recorded that show on video and audio. I'm almost positive I don't have that recording anymore though. I will have to dig through some old hard drives and see. All 3 girls can actually play multiple instruments and sing. They're decently talented so it's weird that there's no live footage. The whole transformation seems incredibly weird. I do remember them being a bit awkward on stage back then but they were preteen or early teens back then though so they didn't have much experience with crowds. If by some snowball's chance I still have the recordings I will definitely share.
I have no doubt they started genuine, but now it's clear subscribers and views were bought, the amount though, is huuuuge.. very expensive! Also seems to be some bots employed, for comments ..what I don't understand, how? If they really did all those concerts as Taylor red, how did NOBODY take any recordings of them!? Not one? And also, the fact that they just make shorts now, up to 30 a day!? That's insane!? So much, they don't even bother to name them different.. it would take atleast an hour to set up sone of those shorts, then you gotta edit, produce, and upload , how do they have so much time!? Such a strange phenomenon, I really hope they are o.k. , and that we get to the truth some day.. for their sake, aswell as our burning curiosity!
@@darianstarfrog I think this is common in a lot of social media sectors. People start out with one thing in mind, but ultimately find their “grift” in a niche…and sometimes have to change that again in a few years in case the channel goes dead. I think that’s reasonable…life is hard and sometimes plans don’t work out. Might as well make that easy money to support you and yours if you’ve lost the original passion.
So far neither Grady nor any comments I've read is addressing the elephant in the room, though -- that they probably didn't start "genuine," they clearly started because their family gassed them up to be a music trio. Which makes sense; one doesn't USUALLY learn multiple instruments by adolescence without coming from a musical family. A lot of teen musicians are legitimately talented, but very few are initially doing it for themselves so much as for their parents. (Not even getting into the niche aspect of Christian music industry.) Even outside of the music industry and parental approval, how many of us are still super focused on whatever our dreams and passions were at 14? If they've figured out "influencer" content (which isn't so unusual if you've spent time around small kids lately -- weird and robotic, sure, but yeah that's normal now; Troom Troom style) so they can fund their own lifestyle? It might not be selling out so much as simply pursuing their own careers. We don't all grow up to be astronaut ballerinas, or even still actually care about the things we did as kids. Even if that's still being managed, I just hope they get enough of the proceeds from it to enjoy themselves.
@@darianstarfrog It's more likely that some footage was taken of them performing, the footage was posted on UA-cam and the people managing this, LiveOnStage, immediately send out a copyright strike and youtube removes the video. They may even send out cease and desists for good measure. It's possible that this company is also running their social media and may be the ones making most of the money, so they would have a vested interest in keeping them small. After all, when a band starts getting traction they are very likely to replace the small company, that got them there, for a larger one that, can take them farther.
This was a great piece of investigative journalism. I wish mainstream journalism worked this hard and was this honest. It kept this 72 yr old non country fan engaged.
Grady, I've never heard of you or Taylor Red but I just watched this entire half hour. You did an excellent job! The format and editing was intriguing and now I'm going to tell this story to my friends. What a strange rabbit hole you took me down, I love UA-cam!
What a weird and interesting deep dive into a thing I knew nothing about and wasn't really interested in, and came through to the other side completely nonplussed. The sort of weird mystery, sinister vibe really hooked me in! Love these kinds of videos.
Oh my gosh, I totally remember seeing them at an event at my grandparents’ church when I was like 12 (so like 2013/2014) and I got a picture with one of them that I still have. We bought their Red Roots CD and my mom would play it fairly often in our car. I totally thought I hallucinated it all though once I found the Taylor Red page so I’m glad I’m not actually crazy
@@matthewstevenlinder Not sure. If we do, it’s buried in storage. But my family also moves a lot so purging is very normal for us and is more likely what happened to it. I remember liking the songs enough, though I’ve never been big into country music, that’s more my mom’s thing which is why she bought the CD in the first place. I even did fanart for them which they responded to on their Facebook (they were very small at the time, definitely didn’t have the huge TikTok following that they have now)
@@matthewstevenlinder I still have the one we bought back then! My wife saw them as contestants on The Great Bible Challenge (hosted by Jeff Foxworthy) where they did, in fact, sing live during it and she bought their Red Roots CD (which was pretty good) and she or my son still play it from time to time.
I almost wonder if they chose the name Taylor Red as an algorithm/SEO thing so they would come up around searches related to Taylor Swift's Red album? Definitely a strange case and a super interesting video!
That seems counterintuitive. Surely top search results would always be about Taylor Swift in that case. Maybe it helps algorithmically in some ways, but doesn’t seem wise in terms of SEO. Especially not if they were originally wanting to be pop country stars.
I think that they realised it is hard to make it in music so they shifted to social media in order to capitalise on their unique selling point of being attractive triplets.
The college I went to had a pair of twins that went out of their way to be exactly the same. They dressed the same, walked in sync, and tried their damndest to speak in unison and finish each others sentences. I think a lot of it was that we went to a small school so if you had a recognizable “thing” you’d be like a campus celebrity and they probably just enjoyed the idea of the attention but… for 4 years? 😬
My younger brothers are twins and they have different personalities but very identical faces. Our Mom did the matching outfit thing and luckily in opposite colors coz it helped us identify one from the other when they were little. My Mom got really cute childhood photos and I dont understand why my brothers cringes when Mom posts them online. They hate wearing identical things and they're adults now so Mom cant make them do anything. As an elder sister who really loved having a pair of cute brothers I can dress up anyway I want, I wish they didnt grew taller than me.
Honestly what's weird to me is these girls are 31 years old and they're making tiktok videos like they're teens. Not saying they're too old for tiktok but the content of their videos are what young teens do. It's like they started out as a serious act and when that didn't work out, they're trying to regress into a much younger audience, but now it's just comes off as weird.
Thank you for making this haha. I needed to know that there’s a community of people who are also freaked out by their fetishy content. They’re like weird fetish robots and their controlled mannerisms are so uncomfortable and cringy.
Agreed! I don't listen to country music at all and had no idea that they actually made music but I get their content pushed to me on UA-cam and Instagram.
I'm with you 100% When I went down the Tramp Stamps rabbit hole, it creeped me wayyy out and borderline scared me. But after learning about Taylor Red from Grady, the Tramp Stamps seem as authentic as Sturgill Simpson. And this video absolutely made me feel more than lightweight terrified. Imagining little kids essentially working as like-subscribe-comment slaves in some 3rd world clickbait sweat shop is a dystopian nightmare. But ironically, it almost feels more sinister to imagine children are voluntarily consuming this content out of their own free will (because even slaves have more agency than zombies). I also thought of Black Mirror, as Grady proposed. Taylor Red is a microcosm of an insipid virus in the greater social media landscape, and it fills me with revulsion. Somehow, I still feel like I need to go deeper down this demented rabbit hole. I just considered that in the near future, a video like this might be auto-generated by AI just for me, based on my internet footprint. Which would mean that Grady himself is an AI robot. Or maybe that isn't the future...it's actually what I just watched. Hahaha, sweet dear lord baby Jesus help me! Time to go for a walk.
I'm not a subscriber and I don't listen to country music very often but this is a fantastic video that contributes to show how the byline of music, artistry, media corporation influence, and just consumerism in general all go hand in hand so well. It was mad entertaining and love the way you introduce the topic and the mystery surrounding these women, their rise, and their influence.
I interned for a country radio station in college. That’s the extent of my familiarity with country music. I have no idea how the algorithm got this video to my feed. That said, bravo. This was a deep friggin’ dive, and I applaud it. These chicks scare the shit out of me. Not because they are scary, but to me it looks like they are… being held hostage? Super weird vibes. Something’s off, here. Their name seems like some kind of SEO-based thing. Doesn’t Taylor Swift have a song called “Red”? Maybe they changed their name to get people to accidentally find that when searching?
The Taylor Swift thing makes a ton of sense. It's similar to how the Beach Boys likely became famous because when shopping for records they were almost always right next to the Beatles in alphabetical order. Of course the beach Boys didn't immediately come off as weird, creepy, and fake like these sisters did. There's something that's so disingenuous and weird about them that beckons me to learn who the hell is really behind this, and what they must be like in everyday life. I think some people truly are NPCs.
Yt recommended this video to me (never seen or heard you before, don't listen to country music), but I have to say.... I very much enjoyed going down this rabbit hole with you! Great job 👏
now I can’t stop thinking about this sister group this is so weird, I’ve went to their channel and it is pretty weird, I’ve also tried to find other videos of UA-camrs talking about Taylor red and this is the only video …. So thank you Grady smith you have passed the infection on to me as well now I won’t be able to get any sleep until I find out more about them and why they are so popular yet so unknown 😂😂😂
I screamed when I saw this video because I've been perplexed with them for more than a year now and didn't think anyone knew who they were. I had to block their account because I COULDN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE, I couldn't take the jump scares from seeing them on my fyp any longer. Thanks for this deep dive, I feel validated
Omg I literally selected the “don’t show me this anymore” option because I felt like my brain was melting the moment I saw a glimpse of one of their stupid videos
This video has legitimately made me reflect on how much time I spend on the internet. I'm wasting my life on THIS? What does it say about society that stuff like their content is what makes it big? Thank you Grady Smith, investigative reporter, for helping me reflect on society and myself.
To me, one of the weirdest sides of the story (and pretty much all of them are weird) is that they initially reached out to Grady with a very musician-y request, to add their song to a playlist. That kind of defeats the theory of them 'not being into music these days'. It almost seems like they have two PR teams, one is doing the 'robovideo' stuff, and one is doing the musical stuff. Basically, they're working two jobs, but what's different from a young musician flipping burgers at McD during the day is that they do that under the same brand.
This was my reading of the situation too. It’s like a company with two separate arms, the music arm & the social media arm. Suspect they might be paying one of those content farm companies to game the system for them re. their social engagement and promo (would explain the pivot to 5 minute crafts-style content, plus all the bots and the weird Spotify analytics), but at the same time it’s obvious they have a few friends in high places… this one’s a real head-scratcher!
My braaaaaaiiinnnn!!!! Why have I spent time looking this up, too?! I had to watch your video for my writing class and now I'm just as baffled as you! lol!
I actually wrote with them a few times when they were pursuing a record deal. It was probably 2016-2017. I don't have anything super helpful to contribute, but I *have* heard them sing and play. I won't comment a lot on that here but I'd say your suspicions aren't way off
42 yr old UK Metal Head… got this recommended for like 2 weeks & finally gave in 😅 loved it! Grady you’re a fantastic editor and storyteller! I 💯 agree these girls are playing the algorithm system and fair play tbh I’d probably do the same 🤷🏻♀️💜
No joke I found them a couple of months ago on tik tok and was equally baffled by them. Something about their tik toks made me VERY uncomfortable. The balloon popping low key feels like fetish content somehow. I had no idea they were even a band. So your video is blowing my mind right now. So bizarre.
Here i was thinking i found another normal video commentator talking about a random weird thing on the internet. Nope, he actually specifically talks about the genre of music i listen to the least😂 this was a cool video, if i find anything else im interested in on your channel ill definitely watch
This video kept popping up for me which was weird, and I didn't want to get depressed reading about someone having their life ruined. But I finally clicked on it and was really invested. I really enjoyed your investigation, now they'll probably get another 1 million views from us curious people checking their videos out lol
This story interests me, and creeps me out. In the beginning of this video my first thought was that they bought followers and viewers, made money and continued that cycle. But it all doesn't add up. You're right, they seem to have no real "interest" in being a country band, or influencers. When they brought up their father and how "helped" them chase their passions, and how they skipped college to pursue this passion, I became increasing skeptical over the whole picture. The small town tours, and fetishy content didn't add up. To me, it really feels like there is someone behind the camera instructing all this. Wether it's a company, family member, or who knows. Someone doesn't want their singing publicized, someone is funding all this, someone is writing the odd scripts, someone is coming up with the video ideas. They don't seem like rude, or foul people, but they know how to work the algorithm, they know how to get sponsors, and make money. It feels SO planned out. The name "Taylor Red", which whenever you Google them comes up with Tayler Swift's famous album. There is definitely a plan we are unaware if, i'm assuming they will at one point die down and vanish like most of these accounts do, but i'll always have my eye on them. Nothing. Adds. Up.
@@alyssa2796 I honestly think that is a very viable option, the money is obviously coming from somewhere. It could be dad, or some other corporate business.
@@parientedehannamontana5067 "its not fetishy content, kids like to watch those kinds of videos" Okay, but really think about your comment... kids watch colorful/vibrant/goofy video >> video gets a lot of views >> bots spam comment section with links to p0rn sites >> children get curious and click on links + potential grooming victims. Not saying that's exactly what happens every time, but it's definitely one of the methods. Also, anything can be fetishized. Crushing things (especially with feet) is most definitely one of them.
When I saw the balloon popping I asked myself "Is this just fetish content?" When I saw the popsicles I answered, "Yes." When I saw the ketchup in the face, I felt I needed to shower.
Yep! And why chase christian country fame when they can make bank making weird videos. Both kids and fetishists watch and they don't need to tour or grind.
honestly, my best educated guess from living in the music industry....they signed a super shitty and exploitative contract early in their years (likely from a parent using them as a payday), or their contract was bought out by a social media content farming corp from across seas who is using them as "influencers" when it became obvious they weren't going to be the next Amy Grant.
I'm not fascinated by these girls. I am fascinated by your fascination with these girls -- your quest to follow your obsession and figure it out and how this obsession wouldn't leave you alone. That to me, along with the insight into how social media popularity is structured is fascinating. If this were a Netflix investigative story some executive would find a way to stretch this take out to three episodes and one of the triplets would secretly be a serial killer. If this were Reddit I would give you an award.
LOL wow...... I had the exact same thoughts-- "If this were a Netflix investigative story some executive would find a way to stretch this take out to three episodes and one of the triplets would secretly be a serial killer." like literally from start to finish. A few mins ago before reading the comments I thought "this guy did this so well. this would be such a great netflix documentary if one of them ended up just totally going crazy and killing someone" -lol it's cool that our mind paths were the same.
For me, this fascination reminded me of days where I was so obsessed with Alan Resnick and searching about all things he ever made. He's artist, but he makes very liminal-feeling videos and movies, and these girls also had very uncanny valley feeling, so...
I went to school and church with Natalie, Nika, and Nicole. They were nice, but I agree, their videos are weird. Almost like they are robots now. They started as a Christian country band called Red Roots. They can play real instruments, which is more than you can say for most musicians these days. Without giving too much away, lets just say they had the funding and support necessary to pursue music. Even in high school they pulled the whole unison schtick. Their self identity is externally aware and I feel being forced to do everything together kept them from developing normal relationships. That made it an easy choice for them to choose to purse fame over the normal family dynamic. (not saying that's a bad thing) Interestingly enough, I am a twin and when we were in school, our school had the highest number of twins and triplets in the country. We all got called to the playground once for our picture to be taken. I think there where 10 or 12 sets of twins and triplets all just a few years apart in age. In my grade alone there were at least 4 sets of twins including myself. edit: They do preform live. I've seen it.
@@Kat-gp6gj Same old story of all wannabes. Follow the trends to gain followers then market those followers. However, to build fame that last you need more than just the ability to copy the ideas of others. I think these videos match their talents of arts and crafts and therefore are easy enough to make. They clearly have the down time between their music "career" to dedicate to making shorts. However, I cannot name one act that was successful without focusing on improving their music. They have talent and are capable musicians, but ultimately their songs are bland and don't connect with the audience. My guess is that their music career hasn't paid the bills and after spending years throwing things at the wall, these shorts are the first thing that stuck. Their father owned a John Deere dealership here for years, but sold it after they finished high school and moved to Nashville with them when they left to purse music. I wonder if he still has an active roll managing them. Personally, I like country music that connects and is relatable. For example, when Hank Williams sang about sorrow, loneliness, and despair, he connected with the audience through a shared emotional experience. While NNN, grew up around redneck culture, no one is going to believe for a second that they know what it means to live the lifestyle that modern country music promotes. Spending years chasing fame has left them without the life experiences necessary to connect with people in the genre of music they purse. Maybe if they where making the elevator music you expect to hear at a Starbucks, then that's something you could expect them to know about. The fame chasing and triplet schtick makes them seem like lifeless robots and has kept them from sharing their individualism. People who know them, know they are much more interesting people when they are not together and playing the part of the robot. Their dad is a stand up guy though. He and I got along pretty well back in the day. He was active in our church and I often got assigned to him when we had summer camp and events.
@@Kat-gp6gj Reminds me much of rebecca black. Super rich, very little talent. Super high quality video regardless. But maybe more talent in these girls.... but not a lot of marketability? Not good enough to break through?
@@theterriblegamer1228 but did they actually seem like THEY wanted to be musicians? Everything you've written sounds a lot like children being smashed into their parents' ideals, even to the point of moving them to Nashville. I know so many adult women who are grateful to have escaped their home church and parents (not their faith, just The Church) and that's not even factoring in the red hair and music industry thing. And I'm not saying the dad is controlling them (since looks like they were able to rebrand and eventually stop playing music despite all the, well, sunk cost), just that... parental expectations are pretty intense, especially for young girls in evangelical circles. (Plus, as you pointed out, having to be "Triplets" likely did very much hurt their ability to be normal children socially.) So many of these comments are coming from a place that assumes continuing a music career is the purest noble goal. Grady is a country music channel, so it makes sense the conversation is about "authentic" country, etc. but I know a lot of former violin kids who didn't get a chance to consider if THEY actually wanted to be musicians until adulthood, either. I didn't go into the career I was certain I loved at 15.
They used to be a group called "Red Roots" and did Christian country music. I was super into them as a kid, i have one of their CDs, I tried finding them a couple years ago and red roots didn't seem to exist. This shocked me when when saw your video lol
Thanks for clearing this up (or at least attempting to.) I’ve seen their cringy videos on Facebook and they drive me crazy. At least you provided something on them.
I was the guy setting up their stage when they were Red Roots. I handed that keyboard to Natalie and she said thank you and I was crushin’. Oh, and they sing live and do it well! When it comes to online, their audio is linked to royalties and each time it plays they get money..with that many followers I would use that much copyrighted music too! Did you realize that they changed their name right around the time they were endorsed by Taylor guitars?
This was so validating, because I have had the same confusion and fascination over this group. For a long time I wondered if there were truly 3 of them, or if it was just one person! Their videos feel so so strange. Thank you for this deep dive! I totally wish they just made regular country band content.. I would be a fan. As it is.. all I can do is shake my head! But, for that amount of money, it makes sense they would make this weird content. They probably just see it as acting/false personas and are totally normal in real life. Definitely strange!
This is top tier content. I can't stop dissecting their strange response to your DM. I have literally never heard the phrase "fun sister content." And what can't they believe is happening? Their success? You making a video about them? Wild. I feel a tinge of worry for them, and hope they are okay and are in control of their own lives.
It was just a copy-and-paste reply and was not customized to Grady's DM to them. "Congrats on your UA-cam success!!" was because a lot of kids who have a UA-cam account post at least a few videos of their own, and probably most of the DMs the triplet account gets are requests for an interview or some sort of collaboration. Alluding to "your UA-cam success" is friendly boilerplate and it is a way to say NO to every request without seeming entirely unresponsive. Someone (almost surely NOT a triplet) is going through and copypasting that to every DM they get. If you're skeptical try DMing them and see what kind of reply you get.
This video is deranged. Enjoy. I've also spent like a year on it. So now that it's out of my system, maybe I can get to some of the other music. But I promise you, I had to get this out of my system.
Please tell me there are a dozen of these groups that exist so I can watch more of this conspiracy content. I am here for it!
This is almost like yhe van life girl. This video should get alot of attention because it exposes alot of stuff that has been exposed by other youtubers. You did a great job also that company has been linked to doing stuff like this for safe marketing influencers to sell and advertise for companies. Good job man been watching for so long i cant remember.
totally was sucked into this video. love it!
This may be best video you've ever done. I'm grateful you've exposed this. I haven't yet put my finger on it, but this is some evil and sinister stuff.
This type of investigative video is so fascinating to me, and doubly so when it’s this subject. If you haven’t seen it already I’d recommend watching “The nightmare videos of children’s youtube” Ted Talk, it’s by a guy named James Bridle. It explores what I’m pretty sure is happening here, what with the content farming and the millions of bots and the gibberish comments that are likely toddlers being left with an iPad unattended. Truthfully the answer is probably nothing more than “it’s for money”, and that’s obviously fine! Let them make money! But I think people, myself included, find that the soulless nature of it all is pretty sinister lol. Great video Grady!! I hope you feel better having passed on your personal Ringu curse lmao
Why on earth did I just spend 30 minutes of the only life I've got, watching a guy who I've never seen another video of, talking about a TikTok girl band I've never heard of, who sing in a genre of music I'd never listen to? The fact that I actually finished this video is as much a mystery to me as Taylor Red is to you.
My thoughts exactly, it makes me feel like there's going to be an iceberg video about all of this in the distant future 😆
Same
Because they want our lives! Wasting our time brings them money... Interesting, huh? Never heard of this guy, nor the girls.
Same!
Why did I watch this entire video. Fuck sake
The fact that this video got pushed to so many non country fans just hilariously adds to the whole weirdness of it all 😂
No kidding, not that i don't like CM, but it's far and few.
I’m in that boat too. I actually never listen to country music but I watched this whole video 😅🤷
Yeah I’m like “wait…how did I get here…” but also I can’t stop watching
I dislike country music so much (& my Mother is from Saskatchewan!) that if I go into a store that is playing loud country, I have to take a deep breath and power shop so I can get in and out as quickly as possible before my soul starts going down a sadness spiral... and I was recommended this video and watched it until the last second
yup , weird indeed 🎉
Taylor Red: “Please consider adding our NEW single to your Spotify playlist”
Grady: “Best I can do is spend a year making a 30 minute exposé”
This is fucking gold. lol
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
YESSSS 😂
Ha! Yes!
💀
They did a small church concert in my town in about 2013. They were called The Red Roots. They were a Christian band, and the vibes I got was that their family was very controlling and maybe was forcing them to sing and perform.
That's what worried me the moment he mentioned their dad being their manager and them missing out on college. He's been making this a career for them since they were kids and if he's the one whose still controlling everything and he's realized the cash he can make off this weird baby content, everything makes way more sense to me.
I hope the girls are at least able to enjoy their "success" at least...
@@okayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy reminds me of the Shaggs. which honestly is the better band
Was gonna comment that they also performed in my town for our church’s youth group. So weird to see this video 10+ years later
I watching this video right after watching the Duggar family Duggar documentary on Prime where Jill talks about how she received 0 money from the shows and it went all to the dad. These twins seem robotic. I think you might be right.
Thanks for your "vibes" about what "maybe" was happening in 2013 lol
WELL, I'm about to drag you back to it. This is called "fetishist farming". Most of their videos cater to niche fetishes like balloon popping, food fights, sensory play, triplets, redheads etc. It's genius, really because they can totally claim they had no idea....but it's the ENTIRE point. There are MANY accounts like theirs.
Boosting because you're exactly right. I just watched another TikTok creator do a video explaining so much weird content as being fetish-specific. It would be so interesting to know how those sisters came to understand that market, and how they decided to get involved in it. Maybe a savvy manager got ahold of them and explained all the money they could be making. What a departure from their Baptist Country roots.
My brain 🧠 just exploded....because this all makes sense!
Ohhh and I was thinking they bought followers or something. But this makes a lot of sense.
@darukineo i think it's a mixture of both!!! fetish farming and bought followers.
YES YES YES to this..... exactly!!!!
It's so comforting to watch someone else going down an absolutely pointless rabbit hole that will never have a satisfying conclusion. I'm also invested now lol
Same! 😂
Imr!!????
-“ thank God it ain’t fucking me this time!!”
-what you and I are thinking!! 😂😂😂😂
We are infected lol
He's a good promoter
Reminiscent of Milli Vanilli
My boyfriend and I have a running theory about this type of robot like content. It feels VERY heavily geared towards children. Bright colors, easy to understand even if there are no words spoken, high energy that is not normal in day to day life. Kids eat it up. This is where the views come into play because kids are the ones sitting scrolling for hours on end, but not old enough to fully engage in the content with comments or to seek them out on other platforms like twitter (which kids typically don’t have). Kids content is also really marketable and brand partnership worthy. It just helps to answer the question of why the engagement never matches the view counts. This is true on a lot of channels and accounts that make this child like content. Kids watch but don’t engage as often
Then why wouldn't American kids watch it? It's mostly Indonesian, Pilipino, Brazilian viewers
If this is being targeted at them, which it can perfectly well be the case, there's something very, very wrong with these girls.
@@DonnaDoveWinters Those demographics can't go to Twitter easily and cancel UA-cam by tomorrow. I also doubt their parents would understand that this is creepy fetish material and would find no reason to.
This type of thing was exposed nearly a decade ago, it definitely seems it's finding a resurgence.
Totally! When he showed the top UA-cam creators they were among the ones watched by kids.
Gross cause some of the content is giving me fetish vibes like 5 minute crafts and kids are watching this.
this also explains why younger non english viewers would watch them too. less language, more visual. i would imagine more visual content could translate to more viewers worldwide, without a language barrier to separate them.
and obvs the fetishy aspect probs plays into to their viewership too. but sadly fetish/kids content have had a disgusting blend as of lately.
I love this kind of video, where someone I’ve never heard makes a well-produced deep dive into a subject that they are compelled by. A fascinating glimpse into an obscure phenomenon and someone else’s brain. Great job!
I‘m thinking this exactly while watching this video!
as a Brazilian who's utterly uninsterested in American country music I'm completely clueless as to why youtube's algorithm would recommend this vid to me. but I'm so glad it did! I was hooked the entire time. looking forward to part 2 if there's one!
Caraca, pior que esse vídeo foi recomendado hoje também do nada, mas acabei me intrigando com a história kkkkk
Foi recomendado pra mim também hahahaha, assisti tudo e AMEI
Eita!!
If you watch commentary, thats probably why it got recommended to you. Thats how it got recommended to me.
@@3v068 Yep. Seems to be the case.
With regards
0 interest in music related content here and especially country lol, from Sweden
this is the exact reason why i'll never give my baby an ipad because then they'll end up watching creepy triplets make borderline fetish content
I feel like “Borderline” is VERY generous of you to say. lol
I thought the same thing but then i remembered being a kid in a strict house and it did nothing for me, and i was a kid/teen before the internet
I still saw porn from the kid that had the hidden magazine in the woods, still heard and saw shit that my parents didn't want me to, and when my very strict father died when i was 11 i quickly went down hill and by 18 i would consider myself a drunk and budding drug addict, which became a full blown drug addict by 21/22 and was hooked on pain pills for 15+ years. Not telling anyone how to parent but with my daughter i told her anything she wanted to know and didn't make it scary, didn't try to make her think what i wanted (my parents always told me that drugs and alcohol will kill you or at least put me in jail without telling me why people would even think about doing them, so when i tried them i knew they just lied to me and treated me like a dumb kid) i told my daughter the truth as best i could and explained things through my experiences, shes only 13 but so far, so good. Shes funny, caring, stands up for others, hasn't touched drugs or alcohol, tells me when her friends do, and the most important thing to me that she does, that i was too afraid to do as a kid is, she comes to at least one of us to talk about important things in her life, if not both of us, and thats all i really want from her is to feel comfortable enough to talk to us if she needs help. And im not some hippy dippy, free range, blah blah blah, im old school in a way, i have anger issues due to my past that she helps keep in check, ive punished/yelled at her but ive always taught her if she feels im in the wrong then challenge me and state your case, if im wrong and she makes a good argument then i go over it with her and apologize, also that i have very little control over her now and in a few years ill have absolutely no control of what she does or who she becomes so its my job to make sure at 18 she can leave if she wants to and she'll be prepared for the world ahead of her, which includes me talking to her at 4yrs old about kid nappings and sexual creeps, explaining as best i could why these people do these things, what to look out for, as a women she has a way higher chance of being attcked, etc. Never held anything back but when i told her about something new it wasnt a 5 minute convo, it was 30/60 mins right then and there, and also reminders and new information i might have forgotten or described wrong. Shes only 13 and it could go to shit next week but im proud of the young lady she is, and positive about the amazing woman she'll become. Sorry this was long but i gush over my daughter when children are brought up because i can't believe a loser like me that fucked up 2/3rds of his life by the time she was born could be 33.3% involved in helping a beautiful soul like hers flourish (her mother 33.3%, me 33.3% and my daughter herself is the other 33.3% because kids are sponges but not all of them learn the same, like me who was a total fuck up for 30 years)
If you dont want to read that whole comment i guess the bottom line of it was kids outside of your home will show/teach/say/do/etc your kid things they don't have access to or knowledge of so the way i looked at it was, I'd rather teach her how to use these things that are everywhere and not going anywhere, including teaching her about all the bad so that when she is shown things by others she knows how to handle herself. Basically i love that little shit and im proud of who she is right now. If you dont teach them, someone else will.
@@thegreendank1 that’s you. Not everyone’s journey will be the same
@@thegreendank1 paragraphs are your friend, friend.
Hey Grady, I actually worked at one of their concerts as a video switcher. We weren't allowed to record so my job was mainly for the in house screens. As you said in the video, Taylor Red was playing for an entirely elderly crowd. It was interesting too as they were introduced as social media famous, for a not social media savvy group. If you were wondering, they only played covers of country songs
post the video to your youtube i’d love to see it
@@flobz7465 He said they weren't allowed to record.
@@belajadevotchka2 oh i read it wrong oops
The balloon popping screams some type of fetishized thing to me
what ...? not allowed to record.... ??? who ever does that...???
This group has been showing up on TikTok for me FOREVER and the vibes have been bugging me this entire time, it’s been YEARS at this point and I’m so glad someone picked up the same energy I did. Thank you so much for taking a look into this!
Same girl
Same here, I dunno how I feel. It's annoying
They also named their band in a perfect way to be *impossible* to search for anyone posting raw concert footage because the same tags and keywords that someone may use to post would be completely swamped with Taylor Swift, Red content.
I was thinking this. They took an already famous person/bands name. It’s completely possible some of their sponsors thought it was Taylor Swift.
@@simplesimply3753 lol I highly doubt the sponsors thought they were Taylor Swift haha, that would be a big brand deal there’s no way they could overlook that.
I thought that straight away but for the opposite reason. If people type in Taylor Red, looking for Taylor Swift's album Red, they could come across their channel and subscribe. Especially since they're a country band, they might have been hoping on some of Taylor's fans who love her old country style. They will have been disappointed but I know I've subbed to channels before based on one video then never watched anything else of theirs again but just never bothered to unsub. It'd explain their high number of followers to low numbers of views ratio, to some degree anyway.
especially with the "TV" after their username... after the release of Red (TV)
@@ravencce Good catch! I don't know how I didn't notice that myself.
Grady, you're not crazy. Their DAD is behind all of this. Find the dad and you will know how he orchestrated all of this since the beginning. He's also behind the LIVE ONSTAGE business.
Clearly, a sort of Jamie Spears situation going on here.
@@marcelaleiva1043 yep thats what i think
Too bad "wear yellow if you need help" won't work since they've probably done any absurdity possible. Plus they don't engage with comments so probably not allowed onto social media. Shit, this could be real bad. And how many more other cases of this kind of slavery that we haven't heard about..
My mom used to buy Insta comments/likes/followers from a weird website called Fiver (she wasn't even trying to be an influencer, she just liked the validation even though it was fake... I also think she was trying to get attention from a celeb she had a crush on, LONG STORY). But yeah the comments and engagement of these videos looks a LOT like that. Same weird spammy comments, and inflated fake engagement. They probably intended to do a 'fake it until you make it' thing, but kinda like Grady said, ended up realizing the algorithm responded to fake viewership and actually dragged some real viewership in, which generated real money... Something they weren't really making before. Being real "artist" like Travis Scott did that, and actually found real success from it. I feel indifferent as its probably more bands/singers than any of us would think got their start doing crap like this. That being said, I don't like the slightly fetlshy vibe being mixed with something clearly made for children. That... Is actually off-putting.
Of course. Anytime you see a very young family "band" on the pop "music" scene, it's always as a result of the parents. See: the jackson 5, billie eilish, Taylor swift, all the rest...
This scared the crap out of me because it gave me the same exact disturbed feeling I get when I see the weird "kids content" my little nephew watches. There is a lot of content out there that's different than what I watched as a kid... something's off about it... you're onto something for sure.
It's 'subliminally fetish-y'
Kids content and fetish content overlap immensely, especially on tiktok. Often on purpose to maximize amount of viewers. Very disturbing imo
The very visual/non-verbal focus also opens up the markets they can reach: literally anyone who has eyes, no need to speak the same language or any yet for that matter:)
this, so true.. I really wonder whatever happened? Or why did companies even bother back then to produce e.g. cartoons with a proper story? I already felt that same weird way when the switch to 3d-animated cartoons happened. Most of all I wonder whose parents would ever allow their kid to watch this kinda tiktok brain-melting, cringy garbage? It physically pains me.
It’s fetish stuff. The food and drinks exploding on them, balloons popping, triplets…. And countless more weird shit.
In a alternate universe Grady added them to his Spotify playlist, and they became a legit country band instead of making fetish videos.
our man basically sold them into modern slavery not adding them to his play list XD
As someone who doesn't follow country music and has never seen a Grady Smith video in my life, I followed the drama surrounding a tumblr girl band that was called the Tramp Stamps quite passionately, and assumed this video would be about another funny industry plant. What a weird rabbit hole: I loved it.
I miss the tramp stamp drama , that’s also why I am watching this video 😂
SAME
Now what I found odd is that I hadn't heard about the Tramps stamps at all, yet found three channels i regularly follow who had talked about the tramp stamps and I just missed happened to not see their videos. I think when it comes to the algorithm stuff, all of it makes sense if we had more of an honest explanation of how it chooses what it thinks we want to watch.
Same!!
Yeah, I was waiting for the photos of Taylor Red at Stonewall.
This video was about so much more than Tayler Red. It's kind of a huge relief to know that there are so many other people that are creeped out by the weirdness of those tiktoks. Thank you.
I am weirded out by why people watch them. I keep getting crap like that in my tiktok feed and can only stop it by blocking the channel. Which takes longer than it does to skip to the next.
I am genuinely not understanding the appeal in the short looping videos in general. I think its my brain though. I have tried to engage with it and i find it just shows me crap videos and the ones i like are not worth seeing 100's of crap. I had the same feeling with vine. I just dont get it.
@@brettmastema7056 its kids that don't really make choses
@@nate567987 well, that's why there are parents, and if the parents are not doing their job. Then it's not society's job to be obligated to safeguard the world for them. If the parent is harming the kid remove the kid and put them in foster care.
After watching this great story be told and now reading the comments, I find it weird how many people (like myself) said this video was recommended to them apparently by the YT algorithm. We are not country music lovers, do not regularly search for country music artist and had never seen one of Grady’s videos before, but YT kept pushing this video to us. That just strikes me as kind of suspicious given the nature of this video topic.
Well, I for one watch exposes a lot abs tons of music videos so it’s not outlandish that a music channel that does exposes would be recommended to me despite the genre. It’s not that deep. I hate country music, but finding out another industry Plant group exists. It’s fascinating to me.
Well I personally have been watching lots of TikTok expose/analysis videos lately, so for me this recommendation makes sense 😄
Yes, UA-cam kept pushing this to me, too!
UA-cam is an 80% male audience discussing conspiracies and corruption.
Same for me. This was recommended to me, so I thought “Why not?”, but I watch zero music contents on UA-cam. Literally zero. This is kind of weird.
Balloon popping is the first BIG red flag. For some reason, this is a very popular fetish, and is something many sex content creators use to draw attention to their pages because it is guaranteed to pass content restriction checks- nothing graphic or overtly sexual about balloon popping, so it’s a great way to get around those pesky community guidelines, and reach your target audience for your _other_ content.
Twins and triplets is also another fetish thing. And redheads. And food stuff. And also the gasping/shocked stuff. Really hitting all the usual marks. 😬
And I thought I knew about kinks.. balloon popping is a new one to me. Wild
They're fans are on FetLife!!😂😂😂😂
I'm honestly really scared for kids growing up on this kind of stuff, it feels really off. Thanks for bringing attention to this
It feels like grooming content for some reason. That or the kind of child-adjacent fetishey content that weird adults would consume. Both? Idk it creeps me out
ITS ACTUALLY A FETISH THING...
@@alexia3552 Likely the latter, but it immediately reminded me of those baking videos that have creepy voiceovers of awful stories that groom kids.
Don’t have any kids. If I ever do I’m gonna do my darnedest to keep them from screens until adulthood. Might as well give them hard drugs as let them have a cmeraphone
Y’all must have never had any fun. I assume y’all also never watched three stooges or icarly. I have 2 kids and they like this type of content it’s honestly mind numbing but so was high school musical for the 15th time my parents had to watch it. Children don’t have refined tastes that doesn’t mean they never will
I’m in marketing and I think you nailed it when you said they’re getting attention from sponsors because they have a huge following. If I had to guess, I’d say the weird content is a means to make money. The money helps them buy fake followers (which is cheap and easy to do.) They probably paid that promotion company to make them look legitimate. It’s all a well orchestrated hustle, most likely from some girls who tried to make it as musicians and failed. They figured out how to game the system.
I'd bet you're probably pretty close to the truth here.
It would seem so incredibly shallow to me if I was one of the sisters. The three of them have to be completely on the same page with this bizarre and lukewarm content. How long can they pursue making these soulless videos? Perhaps after Grady's expose we'll get some honesty.
This is 100% it.
considering where their views and comments are from i think this is 1000% what is happening
@@OlYables as long as it makes bank
They’re 100% named Taylor Red because of Taylor Swift’s album Red. They added the TV because of “Taylor’s Version” and it works because red was a country album!
That way, people search Taylor red (meaning Taylor swift red) and find these girls instead. They can write TV for Taylor’s version or write country and keep finding these three.
That actually makes so much sense🤯
@@straww_berryyy that's smart
I've thought the same.
edit: i was thinking of Taylor's song "...Ready for it" and confused the titles whoops. thanks @fullsunenthiast for pointing that out!
original comment: And "wait for it..." is the name of another Taylor Swift song that people are on the lookout for, since it hasn't been re-released as a "Taylor's Version" yet.
So any Taylor Swift fan seeing the name Taylor + "Wait for it..." is definitely going to click, or at least be confused for a minute.
Absolutely. Everything about them seems like they have a parent or manager that is pushing them. Like, cramming them down in people's throats until you have no choice but to choke them down.
as an identical twin, no, i can promise you that the harmony does not come naturally
I assumed as much tbh 😂😂😂😂
My brother dated the one with short hair, Natalie, twice. It never worked out. They’re basically not allowed to date. I’ve heard them sing live in a church when they were still red roots. I had one of their CDs and my daughter loved it. I have pictures of them with my kids. In my opinion, they are 100% being controlled. And their voices are actually not good at all. That’s why there is no live footage
I disagree and think their live voices sound great, but I do agree that they're being controlled and that that probably has a lot to do with the way they're perceived by people who actually know them off the internet.
@@torontoluck I agree, they sound fine live, and it is very likely they are being controlled.
@@torontoluck when have you seen them live?
Is it their father that’s controlling or is it a situation where an agent/agency or producer exploits them and they think it’s the only way to make money?
I got the feeling of control, too. Their reactions and expressions all seem... curated, if that makes sense. Like they're redheaded barbie dolls.
Met these girls in 2016. They were absolutely normal and quite talented. I'm so confused right now with their content. I have a picture with them as well. This is just weird.
Did they sing live?
My only theory is they have a manager who's focusing on tiktok but is too old to know how to actually engage with it, so they use bots and algorithmic content instead of actually promoting music. Haven't finished the video yet so I'll see if I'm right
@halohanni1073 did they sing or just meet and greet?
They sang and they were very talented
@@amberwingtundrawing776 i think the same, they signed to bad company or just that company actually want more viral/view so the band more known worldwide before doing the actual thing. Lol
I think they strategically chose Taylor red as their name because Taylor Swift has her album called Red and Taylor was once a country artist too. Like, Taylor is one of the biggest female artists in the game and Red was a huge success, that would mean people looking for Swift, would probably come across them. I think if they ever wanted to get rid of this it would be really easy to hide it under all of Taylor Swifts stuff.
Came here to say this. I think they chose that name so people who were looking for that album or that music, they’d get lost and find them accidentally.
Taylor is there last name and they have red hair
i’m so happy yyou yyou uyou got ygot yin yuuuuup you yuuyy
@alyssa2796 curious what exactly you mean "easy to hide it under Taylor Swift"?
@@AdamCasada its like the thought that disnyey made frozen/called it frozen so people wouldnt google results about walt disneys head being frozen
as a twin, them making identical triplets their whole personality makes me want to dip my face in piranha solution
ur racist
The fact that this video hit outside of Grady's audience in the algorithm is a funny wrinkle to the story
Yes I've never heard of Grady Smith or these sisters but this randomly pop up and I just watched the whole video!
for real, i've listened to one (1) the white buffalo song and nothing else that's semi country, why am i here?
It’s funny cuz I’ve been terrorized by these triplets, they always show up in my recommended everywhere. UA-cam, instagram, Snapchat, etc and I always wondered the same exact things he did 😂 so seeing this pop up in my recommended was so perfect.
@@ruthhemmings5318 me too
This showed up on my feed and I'm not halfway through yet, but it feels like some sort of rabbit hole that would be covered by Nexpo, Night Mind or Nick Crowley. Maybe not an ARG but just one of those creepy tales of girls that are forced to make videos by some creep and you don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
I’m so glad you posted this. My husband is a Nashville producer and was contacted by Taylor Red to write a year ago or so. They ended up bailing, but my husband and I were both so weirded out by their content that I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out.
THIS COMMENT RIGHT HERE! this is crazy dude what?!
@@briannasusz Need-more-info
@@XavierAlfeiranSainz good luck with your hunt man 🤞🏻 i know you’re scouring these comments rn 😂
@@briannasusz just think, it's an AI. "I'm totally a normal person and I've seen them in real life." Meanwhile, any real people out there ever see them? 😆 All deepfakes 😅😆
I think the thing that feels weird is exactly why tiktok in general can be super weird. It's weird kid-targeted brain poison that is also mildly suggestive. It is so so weird.
China Inc. sowing confusion and discord in the US.
Seems like TikTok is functioning as the ultimate infant babysitter these days
TikTok is CCP cyber weapon designed to destroy the minds of American youth.
Their content is def fetish content, not actually intended for kids. The balloons were the dead giveaway.
And also owned by the Chinese government and operated as a way to build databases on people. The app takes all your videos pics locations texts etc.
Thank you for this random deep dive! I'm always fascinated by cases like this. As a professional Social Media manager, I can pretty much guarantee that the majority of views and followers on their accounts are fakes/bots, probably bought with the same money that pays for their well produced recordings and music videos. For influencers of their type, we usually say that an average of about 5-10% of engagement (of the total number of views) is normal. They seem to be ions away from that and their Twitter following is another indication that their legitimate followers are probably in the low 4 figures. This might seem innocent enough, but if they're using these fake numbers to score sponsors and partnerships with major brands, then that's actually a form of fraud. Let's hope that companies do their due diligence and have capable managers that can spot this before losing them a lot of money.
i feel like at this point you need to go to one of their live shows just for this all to come full circle.
My thought this whole video
I don’t think they’re playin anymore bc they are such big influencers now
You can't be somewhere that doesn't exists...
I was expecting that to happen at some point in the video
Fr i want them to come to my small town just so I can get live footage for this poor man
Honestly, I think you got it pretty spot-on - they wanted to market their music through social media initially, but then they just kinda fell into the weirdly profitable kid's content limbo and tought "well, fuck it, might as well"
I think they also paid for a lot of their views, followers and commentators on other platforms before randomly making it lucky on the UA-cam short algorithm.
I don't know if that explains all of it. I dont know we have an clear idea of the mindset or motivations of the girls or their managers or handlers (or even if that is part of it) or if they are knowing what about their content is consciously being done to manipulate the algorithm. I think this one is engaging people because you can't easily say "I see what is happening". I am going to try and see if i can ask a friend who used to work for a company that did that and see if she either can more confidently get what the deal is. Likely its the most boring answer though, Yet my brain still wants it answered.
A lot of people want to believe jibberish comments in other languages are just kids, but it's view bots and comment bots. They leave comments in tons of different languages often that font make sense. I think they bougtt almost all of their 10mil followers personally
These videos have a very strong content farm vibe.
There are companies out there, mostly in Eastern Europe or Central Asia, that hire hundreds of people to stand around in a warehouse around dozens of sets and just produce content all day long. It's where you get all the 5-minute Craft clones from, for example. But you also get things like this, that is seemingly jibberish with no apparent value.
They do that kind of content because it is quick and easy to make, requires minimal editing and you can make 20 of them in a day, so spending a month can fill a channel with content for over a year of several daily uploads. These companies sometimes run up to 200 channels and some of them have diamond play buttons numbering in double digits.
The more you upload, the more views you get. The more views you get, the more money you get.
Taylor Red is the first I've seen that definitely isn't a warehouse in Central Asia though, so I doubt they are part of a content farm network. They seem to be the rare case of someone copying the content farm formula and succeeding with it.
finally.. i thought i was the only one who thought it had 5 minute craft vibes..
Yes! Another person who got it! Ahhgg I feel like someone else needs to do a real expose because I immediately put all the pieces together and you're covering two of them. Taylor Red is indeed a machine but it's powered by people. It's also just as much a front. What I will give them is its an insane blend of luck, aesthetic, a little bit of talent, the hard work of millions of people working in spam/content farms and a few powerful names to pull the strings, and dedication to working that damn algorithm. The luck is what really makes the algorithm work because all it takes is some tweaking to make big money wheh the starting product is three attractive red headed female triplets. That is a rare and powerful money making combination and they figured it out and made it work. And no Grady, they don't give a damn about being professional musicians anymore.
I find the entire process from content creation to how it is viewed to be completely odd and very sad. It's turning kids into zombies, which I'm sure is entirely the point.
I have job at place.
im an eastern european and travelled literally the whole europe... I've never seen a content farm... Only in China and similar asian countries. Stop belittling usm
Watching their videos feels like the perfect manifestation of the empty internet theory. If they actually are just three sisters that have found a market for their fetishy, cringe shorts, more power to them I guess. You're not wrong though, the whole thing just feels off.
I am not on TikTok or Facebook and somehow knew about these girls and felt the same way. Disturbing "child friendly" fetish content that capitalizes on trends. I honestly had the thought they were computer generated at one point because of how odd their movements and behaviors were. Thank you for talking about this!
Those fist pumps are super strange
@@smarti1144 They give me the heebie jeebies, lol
So help me but was only listening and not watching but when he described balloon popping, eating in weird ways my immediate thought was that these videos were for the creepers. Yes possibly also for the illiterate babies 😄 but largely for the weirdos
They are evangelical triplets who have never been allowed to be children or have a life so…… makes sense.
@@mamacito1795 Yeah it's absolutely tailored for both demographics. They are getting the creepers as well as the young kids whose brains are still pudding.
I don't know how UA-cam decided to show this to me but this was so compelling. One of the weirdest parts is that they haven't gotten any kind of legal action from Taylor Swift considering she has an album called Red.
I was thinking the same, not legal action just if that was the reason for their name. Another comment mentioned they changed name about the same time as Taylor guitar sponsored them (I have no clue, never heard of them, I'll keep listening to that red album by the other taylor though :)
Same but then I figured since UA-cam is promoting them that's why this was promoted to us and newer content be UA-cam doesn't really know what the content is just as long as it's got the names they want. It was a great video and I couldn't stop watching.
While it may seem that when they changed their name to Taylor Red the triplets were intentionally hitching their wagon to the star of Taylor Swift's "Red" album, their name WAS actually Taylor and their hair was already red. The synergy is almost absurd, but there you have it. It's like when Mattel sued the Barbi twins for trademark infringement. It was "obvious" that they were profiting off their synergy with the Barbie doll, but their name WAS actually Barbi and they actually were buxom blondes. Mattel lost that lawsuit.
Pretty sure that's not how copyrights work. You can't copyright or trademark a commonly used word like red, and Taylor is a name so again, can't be copyrighted. If they had called themselves Taylor Swift-Red, then the other singer would have a case.
@@aislingoharrigan7543 I'm sure you're right, it wouldn't hold up in court. But sometimes lawyers will threaten legal action in hopes the recipient wants to not go to court at all. Mostly joking though. Sorry :)
The short answer: They make way more money playing the algorithm than they ever would as a z-tier music act. Maybe if they can ever get away from the weirdos they're contracted to they'll change, but let's all be honest here: If we could make 4-5 figures a month popping balloons we'd do the exact same thing.
Lol half the reason I watched the whole video was to see if Grady would somehow inadvertently spill the beans so I could also stop my 9-5 grind and pop balloons, making hundreds of thousands of dollars each month
100%
I think in spite of how mysterious it might look, it's just this simple. A buck's a buck, you know.
I will totally pop the shit out of some balloons for that kind of income. You can always create the art you love when you have the capital from doing the crap that is just for the money.
They are triplets. That's their cash in. Everyone would find it amusing 3 identical young atractive red hair girls doing inuendo things. Dressing in bright colors, having their hair done in three diferent ways, talking at the same time. Its true: is all obtain trough fetishist fishing. They can loose youth, become to old to do this things but... they would still be tripplets. So.. cashing!
So my best guess: they started out in music, but started doing the videos. The audience for their videos is vastly different than the potential audience for their music. The videos have quirky international silliness appeal (similar to the others you showed) and that audience wouldn't be interested in country music (other than some small percentage that gives them a try). So they are really leading two different lives - one in which they do videos for the sexy/silly/fetish appeal, and then are doing their tours and music in the other life. We normally think of these things having synergy and working together, but maybe they figured they need to keep them relatively separate so that the video part can be more successful.
Agreed
Who else now wants Grady to make more videos uncovering weird things like this in country music?
Right! It was like telling a story or a deep journalist dive on the subject.
Hopefully a deep dive on Orville Peck ending with an interview where we find out his spot on his research was
Oh, definitely!
I agree! I was very captivated by this video for some reason. Lol
The Amazing Mysteries of Country Music, hosted by Grady Smith
This kind of content that they produce is EXACTLY the kind of thing my five-year-old nephew would watch on UA-cam, just endlessly jumping from one video to the next. I think you're onto the right idea with it being for kids who are just looking for something bright and distracting. Honestly it's such a weird, dark corner of the internet that gives me the creeps. Love seeing such a unique, different video approach from you. Really cool vid, great work!
It's like lofi kids show from before the internet. Idk why something simple bright and colorful can seem empty and depressing.
@@johnindigo5477 excellent way of putting it. It is very reminiscent of those low-budget public access tv shows for kids, except with even less substance and theme. It's like those spider man Elsa videos, and the people who make them are weird as hell including these girls. They don't care about or even like kids, they have zero passion for it, they just happened to stumble into this gold mine of low effort kiddie content.
That was my take, it's no different then all those creepy videos of people playing with dolls, low quality content for four year olds. These girls don't even have that great of a hustle, they could be putting in a lot less work for the same result.
Betcha Taylor Red gets bigger than shit when your five year old nephew's a teenager.
Elsagate
I cannot stop laughing. This entire video and situation is as hysterical as it is unnerving and confusing. It's like if the concept of 'uncanny valley' had a physical embodiment. The entire situation, from the fact that they are so pervasive in areas of the internet while simultaneously seeming like there is no evidence that they even exist, to the outlandishness of their content, the internet scrubbing... what the hell. I'm obsessed.
Either a legal situation (signed a contract/under threat), and/or some kind of artistic stunt - e.g. the little poppy videos.
There are other strange internet phenomenon, this is probably the least of them.
Another possibility is a weird kind of scam, a sort of catfishing where the original artists aren't aware they are being ripped off. That's unlikely but not impossible, and might partially explain the aversion to live music.
OFC best way to know would be an actual interview. I'm not even sure if this video isn't some sort of publicity stunt.
Anyways, weird stuff. 🤪
I feel like it mostly gets explained in the video - initially unpopular country band - follower inflation through bots - bizarre videos made for kids - getting views from said videos - artificially pumping out more of this brainless subhuman content.
What I'm wondering about is why in the world did UA-cam themselves publicise them? That's what I find strangest of all.
The main mystery to me is the Susan tweet, based on your assertion that she rarely tweets (so I'm assuming she doesn't congratulate every channel passing milestones).
The rest seems like J-idols with seedy management, exploiting teenagers' dreams of the stage.
I've never heard of you before, and I've never heard of these girls before...
I am totally unimpressed with these girls, and never need to hear about them again.
You, on the other hand, did an excellent job presenting this story and provided some solid entertainment that I'll never need to revisit lol.
Well he still got you to engage, so that was a win to the algorithm.
The biggest takeaway for me is that too many parents are letting their toddlers stare at an iPad for hours watching only God knows what
It's the entire reason for the absurd amount of views on this type of trash content, and is very similar to the Elsa Gate phenomenon.
Yes exactly
Correct.
I'm not from the US, I've never watched a country music related video before or listened to the music volutarily but now Taylor Red lives rentfree in my head too. Thank you.
same
Damn. That's sad. You're so boring. LOL
Same
same
Let me add a whole new level of weirdness to this whole situation.
I came across your video as a result of somebody posting the link as a reply to a tweet by a parody account named "Christian Nightmares" in which they posted one of their short videos doing the whole rice thing.
I initially didn't watch your video but read the comments and found the one where someone mentioned something about "fetish farming", did I screencap and posted it as a reply.
Then sometime over night I noticed somebody replied to my reply by posting a link to this video.... Which I thought it was weird because that's where the comment came from.
This morning I watched your video, which is absolutely fascinating and I'm glad I did, and I realized this reminded me of something else that I had run into a few times, a channel named Ratata and about which I had tweeted in the past for similar reasons as you. I found my original tweet and I went to post it in the tweet by Christian Nightmares as an example of something similar.
But as I scrolled down older replies I noticed that the person who posted a link to this video on my reply had actually gone down almost all the replies and reposted the same link... No text, no comment, just the link to this video.... Even on replies that had a link to this video already... Almost as if someone had gone and automatically replied blindly.
And then I saw it. I didn't noticed it at first but there it was....
The person posting the links to this video is named...
Ben Taylor.
Taylor Red used to be my favorite band back when they were the Red Roots. I saw them live in a concert and bought all three of their albums. I still have all those tracks digitally even when they've all disappeared from the Internet. I've always been confused by their rebranding and their tick-tock stuff, and why they've never addressed why they deleted all their red roots music and content. Thank you for making this video and trying to answer some of these questions for them.
God I can only imagine how weird this is to witness as a fan
Trolls gonna troll.
You mean the red sisters are trolls?
@@smsmsmsmsmsm It was! At first, when they rebranded as Taylor Red, I followed their music and Facebook page and it was fairly okay. But not too long after I remember the tic-toc algorithm putting them on my for-you page. I was like, what the heck?
@@lordfahren they literally sold their soul._.
The response he received from them perfectly brought this whole weird experience full circle.
No it made me question everything again 😭
That response seemed like a computer generated generic response sent to any one who responds to them. I bet if I sent them something I would probably get the same response,
@@troypatterson6013 try it and let us know !!!! I’m so curious.
@@ThatGirlKia13 gonna do it, I'll be back
@@spaceedementia whatd they say?
This was a fascinating deep dive and I really admire your commitment to unearthing the truth to this story!!
Also thank you for highlighting the rise in weird videos that are flooding these social media platforms - whether it’s fetishist, or creators throwing everything at the wall and hoping something breaks through the algorithm, it’s weird and unnerving
I think you hit the nail on the head- this shit is so lucrative. And yeah a lot of it is fetish content- the balloons, the messy food, the weird food combinations, the really specific hand gesturing- it’s fetish content.
I'm wondering, if these girls actually know what they're doing. Like.. They are always on camera all 3 of them, and their dad is their manager and behind the live production company selling their shows. Just a thought:
The dad has been surfing on some unsavoury sites encountering this fetish material, noticing how popular it is. "Hey, I have three pretty young daughters, and a big part of this fetish stuff is youtube friendly if you exclude nudity from it. You can make money there.... hmmm... I could probably get my girls to step on some balloons and mess around with food on camera... GIRLS!! GIRLS COME IN HERE, I HAVE AN IDEA!..."
Fetish content yep but I don't think they are the ones coming up with the ideas and I wonder if they realize the content is fetish related.
@@NobodysbbyYeah, the post claiming they may be controlled by their dad has me really creeped out. They seemed genuine and nice when I saw them perform live many years back. But they were teens.
What if they want to be musicians and someone is making them do this fetish stuff to make money off them and the three girls think it’s a career move to get their band going?
They had real musical talent (particularly one of them who played violin).
@@Andreamom001 I mean I see what your saying maybe it is the dad but we all thought the psychic twins were good people until slowly people realized they were con artists. I don't know but these girls just look dead in the eyes and their actions are very robotic. They don't look like they are ever actually having any fun. And he said they post 30-40 videos a day? I mean that's just weird no matter who or what is managing them. Whoever they are has a sinister side to them and in sure the girls are not aware if they are then I won't what other fetish related content they make that we are not aware of perhaps on other sites .
Oh my god not the fetish hand movements they make me so uncomfy
*My Theory:*
They were hired by a content-farm-style company in maybe India or Indonesia, and that company is who is actually running the channel, while the girls just produce the videos at the company's direction. The reason they have so many followers with such little engagement is because their videos are designed to appeal to kids, so they're being watched on UA-cam Kids _where comments are automatically disabled._
That's my guess. Every time I see a channel with a ridiculous number of views or subscribers and almost no comments, it's always a channel that makes those exact kinds of videos aimed at kids, and every time I see a channel reuse and repost content, it's a content farm. Hiring a triplet country band would be a unique angle though. Never seen that before.
And now I'm dying to know if I'm right!
I am from Indonesia, not into country music, but their shorts, well its like pushed into our (me and my kids) endless scrolls of yt shorts. Best I can do to particular types of short videos (many worse) that are --I think-- 'not of our cup of tea', is just tap that "Don't recommend channel" button.
Yea idk about that
Sounds like they saw what gets trendy
Copied it
Got a bunch of money
And never stopped
I think they wanted to start as a legit band but since that brought nothing to the table they probably had their label or whoever in charge of their social media
Start having them post to tiktok with those brain dead viral videos🎃
What I don't get, is why these "content farms" choose such an uber cringe worthy style for videos? And more baffling is why this uber cringe stuff gets views at all?
@@nancyneyedly4587 little kids
Bright meaningless content that can stare at and drool over with no real thought
Little kids are basically born with an iPad in their hand so ofc they’ll do the quick scroll content without thinking
They just see “omg Elsa” “Omg bright colors” “woAh balloons” and keep watching
I think you are 100% correct on the UA-cam Kids thing.
I'll tell you why.
I come from a family who currently consists of many kids in the "mom can I watch UA-cam on your phone/ipad?"- age/phase.
I'm the type of person who usually go hang out with the kids at family gatherings, when I feel like the adults become too loud or political (usually followed by comments like "Are you sure you wanna watch the kids while we sit here drinking and talking elections/jobs/tell the same story 16 times? You dont have to if you don't want to/but please do it so we can gossip without having to worry if our kids are clogging the toilet with towels, like last time" and "Aww, look at her, she is amazing with kids.. Anyway, so this bitch Patricia from work is totally BJ'ing the boss").
The kids often sit with each of their parents phones, and kind of "doom scroll" through "kid friendly" UA-cam shorts (Im rarely able to convince them to do anything else).
The videos are often the exact same format: Bright pastel colors, 1.5 speed, no sound other than uptempo background music, "pranks", "challenges", foods and liquids, and unboxing toys. And sometimes have the weird fetish-element, too subtle for kids to notice.
And these 3 redheads have popped up NUMEROUS times, and across all the "kids with devices" I've encountered the past year.
When I ask any of the kids who the people in the shorts are, they have no idea/just kinda shrug. Unless its someone dressed as a Disney character.
This reeks of all the weird children's video stuff that got banned a few years back, but they've somehow managed to circumvent the restrictions. I would say your speculation that some creepy manager is controlling them to make all this content is incredibly likely. If we're to believe they are real individual humans with their own minds, maybe one of them will desert the others and come clean some day... Incredible rabbit hole reporting! Hope you make more like this
what your saying reminds me of another case of a "chiristan" tiktoker i think that may be likely many people out there are trying to use chiristany or many other religions to excuse terrible behavior but even if its not that this case is still strange
It’s honestly so bizarre. They’re all so similar; someone must be directing this strange approach to entertainment production
i thinks it's absolutely kids watching this weird type of short. That stuff was banned because it hid lots of horrible things in it. These videos are weird but innocent.
There content is mostly fine and they're doing whatever gets them views. Just pumping out same silly content
@@Xander1Sheridan Exactly. These videos are completely innocent, but they just FEEL so insidious because they use a lot of the same tactics and content style as those horrible videos.
Dude this is nuts, I was halfway through your video when I realized I have seen these girls live. My daughter even has a poster somewhere. I can confirm they’re actually decent live and they do have a good production. I saw them while visiting my grandfather in Texas. They played at a Dell Webb community center for a bunch of retiree’s.
Being a native Spanish speaker and knowing what international audiences like, I think that their content isn't targeted towards Americans at all. Many videos on Spanish UA-cam for instance, is flooded with cringey and juvenile content. For some reason, these videos always have millions of views with little explanation. It seems that Taylor Red just figured out that making cringey content for international audiences makes a lot more money than what one might think.
It seems to tap into the same algorithm of those strange, and inexplicably popular "baby" videos of poorly-animated Disney and Marvel characters interacting and dancing to strange music and sounds. It's the "baby with an iPad" syndrome: flooding the platform with pablum like this is purely view-mining from these naive and (likely foreign, as you point out) markets.
I saw a video about Asian UA-camrs doing the same thing. When he pointed out the weird costumes that reminded me of view miners.
Very astute
It makes way more sense in that light. I guess part of the uncanny aspect might be the same cultural barrier that makes Japanese game shows and commercials seem so bizarre to the rest of the world
Yup, I do think the content Taylor Red is doing is something that work yhe best for the non english audiences. All it requires is for you understand what is happening visually, so it removes a lot of barriers.
I've also seen kids who don't yet know how to speak binging similar content. It's colorful, it's silly, it's strange. It's like dangling a set of shiny keys in the front of their eyes, with the difference they can quickly jump from one set of keys to other.
Taylor Red, or who ever is behind them, is playing the algorithm game and is doing so very well. They've take the pages from the same play book as those Indian and Chinese UA-cam content farms, which push out similar content day after day.
This whole thing is an enitrely self made problem for the social media platforms. In their quest of fast revolving contnent that creates endless revenue streams of advertisement money, they've created an eco system of this kind of mindless fluff.
I am so glad to see that other people are seeing how creepy their stuff is. This isn't the content people want, it is the content the platforms push at ALL of us no matter what our actually viewing habits may be.
But it's not creepy, it's just silly and stupid, the algorithm doesn't make people want, it feeds the want.
@@dionysusnowIt is fetish content.
Kids, their target demographic, do not see this as "fetish" content, you do.
they push it to all of us but mostly young kids,
@@ToryIsCooliest "Fetish content" ?!?!??!
Bro... what?
This was fascinating to me. My vote is that they’re hired to be a social experiment for testing ideas and seeing what sells or attracts. Kinda conspiracy-ish, I know.
Oooo i like it
It’s kinda like Elsa gate
Not really that conspiracy-ish tbh. I do get major Slurms MacKenzie vibes from them though.
@@lenfantsuave whimmy wam wam wazzle!!
@@seraphim7512 true that
Holy shit. I've seen these weird videos and it never clicked with me. I moved to Hurley, MS like fourteen years ago and it's right next to Wade. These girls were all the rage in our little Pentecostal Movement when they started out. I'm pretty sure I actually have one of their CDs somewhere that I got when I went to hear them sing. I'm so glad I stuck this one out. I about damn keeled over when you revealed that part.
OK, I can confirm the Red Roots history. I live in South Mississippi where the girls are from. They used to perform at local churches and events here. We had them at a fall festival at the church I used to attend and I even recorded that show on video and audio. I'm almost positive I don't have that recording anymore though. I will have to dig through some old hard drives and see. All 3 girls can actually play multiple instruments and sing. They're decently talented so it's weird that there's no live footage. The whole transformation seems incredibly weird. I do remember them being a bit awkward on stage back then but they were preteen or early teens back then though so they didn't have much experience with crowds. If by some snowball's chance I still have the recordings I will definitely share.
I have no doubt they started genuine, but now it's clear subscribers and views were bought, the amount though, is huuuuge.. very expensive! Also seems to be some bots employed, for comments ..what I don't understand, how? If they really did all those concerts as Taylor red, how did NOBODY take any recordings of them!? Not one? And also, the fact that they just make shorts now, up to 30 a day!? That's insane!? So much, they don't even bother to name them different.. it would take atleast an hour to set up sone of those shorts, then you gotta edit, produce, and upload , how do they have so much time!? Such a strange phenomenon, I really hope they are o.k. , and that we get to the truth some day.. for their sake, aswell as our burning curiosity!
@@darianstarfrog I think this is common in a lot of social media sectors. People start out with one thing in mind, but ultimately find their “grift” in a niche…and sometimes have to change that again in a few years in case the channel goes dead. I think that’s reasonable…life is hard and sometimes plans don’t work out. Might as well make that easy money to support you and yours if you’ve lost the original passion.
So far neither Grady nor any comments I've read is addressing the elephant in the room, though -- that they probably didn't start "genuine," they clearly started because their family gassed them up to be a music trio. Which makes sense; one doesn't USUALLY learn multiple instruments by adolescence without coming from a musical family. A lot of teen musicians are legitimately talented, but very few are initially doing it for themselves so much as for their parents. (Not even getting into the niche aspect of Christian music industry.) Even outside of the music industry and parental approval, how many of us are still super focused on whatever our dreams and passions were at 14?
If they've figured out "influencer" content (which isn't so unusual if you've spent time around small kids lately -- weird and robotic, sure, but yeah that's normal now; Troom Troom style) so they can fund their own lifestyle? It might not be selling out so much as simply pursuing their own careers. We don't all grow up to be astronaut ballerinas, or even still actually care about the things we did as kids. Even if that's still being managed, I just hope they get enough of the proceeds from it to enjoy themselves.
@@darianstarfrog You think maybe their views are through some kind of ai /computer programming ? Maybe some of their videos are ai deep fakes too?
@@darianstarfrog It's more likely that some footage was taken of them performing, the footage was posted on UA-cam and the people managing this, LiveOnStage, immediately send out a copyright strike and youtube removes the video. They may even send out cease and desists for good measure. It's possible that this company is also running their social media and may be the ones making most of the money, so they would have a vested interest in keeping them small. After all, when a band starts getting traction they are very likely to replace the small company, that got them there, for a larger one that, can take them farther.
This was a great piece of investigative journalism. I wish mainstream journalism worked this hard and was this honest. It kept this 72 yr old non country fan engaged.
You should look up Friendly Jordies. Australian investigative journalist. Specifically his Bruz series. Fascinating stuff. Think you'd like it.
Grady, I've never heard of you or Taylor Red but I just watched this entire half hour. You did an excellent job! The format and editing was intriguing and now I'm going to tell this story to my friends. What a strange rabbit hole you took me down, I love UA-cam!
Same. Lol
Same.
Yup that'll be me too
nice that there's a space for us folks
Same! He's very good at setting up the mystery and keeping us intrigued
What a weird and interesting deep dive into a thing I knew nothing about and wasn't really interested in, and came through to the other side completely nonplussed. The sort of weird mystery, sinister vibe really hooked me in! Love these kinds of videos.
Oh my gosh, I totally remember seeing them at an event at my grandparents’ church when I was like 12 (so like 2013/2014) and I got a picture with one of them that I still have. We bought their Red Roots CD and my mom would play it fairly often in our car. I totally thought I hallucinated it all though once I found the Taylor Red page so I’m glad I’m not actually crazy
Do you still have the CD?!?!?!?!?!
@@matthewstevenlinder Not sure. If we do, it’s buried in storage. But my family also moves a lot so purging is very normal for us and is more likely what happened to it. I remember liking the songs enough, though I’ve never been big into country music, that’s more my mom’s thing which is why she bought the CD in the first place. I even did fanart for them which they responded to on their Facebook (they were very small at the time, definitely didn’t have the huge TikTok following that they have now)
@@rellimeelrahc oh too bad. Would have been cool to hear what their music sounded like! But that's super cool either way.
@@matthewstevenlinder I still have the one we bought back then! My wife saw them as contestants on The Great Bible Challenge (hosted by Jeff Foxworthy) where they did, in fact, sing live during it and she bought their Red Roots CD (which was pretty good) and she or my son still play it from time to time.
But do you remember a cornucopia on the fruit of the loom label?
I almost wonder if they chose the name Taylor Red as an algorithm/SEO thing so they would come up around searches related to Taylor Swift's Red album? Definitely a strange case and a super interesting video!
I thought this too, but a comment was made they changed their name when Taylor Guitars became a sponsor.
That seems counterintuitive. Surely top search results would always be about Taylor Swift in that case. Maybe it helps algorithmically in some ways, but doesn’t seem wise in terms of SEO. Especially not if they were originally wanting to be pop country stars.
i thought the same thing!
I think that they realised it is hard to make it in music so they shifted to social media in order to capitalise on their unique selling point of being attractive triplets.
Attractive, shallow, triplets, they certainly exceeded their potential.
I believe you’re dead on
This! I think it's obvious
Most of their followers being from Indonesia/India is a huge flag for bots
@@highbread817 INDIA!?No,no,no,no we only listen to our own music
From country farmers to content farmers, how poetic.
Being an identical twin myself…
This behavior is super creepy and I’m really glad our parents never did any of this “matching” crap to us.
The college I went to had a pair of twins that went out of their way to be exactly the same. They dressed the same, walked in sync, and tried their damndest to speak in unison and finish each others sentences. I think a lot of it was that we went to a small school so if you had a recognizable “thing” you’d be like a campus celebrity and they probably just enjoyed the idea of the attention but… for 4 years? 😬
Hahah I've always wondered if twins actually like the matching thing.
My younger brothers are twins and they have different personalities but very identical faces. Our Mom did the matching outfit thing and luckily in opposite colors coz it helped us identify one from the other when they were little. My Mom got really cute childhood photos and I dont understand why my brothers cringes when Mom posts them online. They hate wearing identical things and they're adults now so Mom cant make them do anything. As an elder sister who really loved having a pair of cute brothers I can dress up anyway I want, I wish they didnt grew taller than me.
that’s the thing i was always concerned about with twins )):
Honestly what's weird to me is these girls are 31 years old and they're making tiktok videos like they're teens. Not saying they're too old for tiktok but the content of their videos are what young teens do. It's like they started out as a serious act and when that didn't work out, they're trying to regress into a much younger audience, but now it's just comes off as weird.
Thank you for making this haha. I needed to know that there’s a community of people who are also freaked out by their fetishy content. They’re like weird fetish robots and their controlled mannerisms are so uncomfortable and cringy.
Agreed! I don't listen to country music at all and had no idea that they actually made music but I get their content pushed to me on UA-cam and Instagram.
I agree... they give me mind controlled vibs
I'm with you 100% When I went down the Tramp Stamps rabbit hole, it creeped me wayyy out and borderline scared me. But after learning about Taylor Red from Grady, the Tramp Stamps seem as authentic as Sturgill Simpson. And this video absolutely made me feel more than lightweight terrified.
Imagining little kids essentially working as like-subscribe-comment slaves in some 3rd world clickbait sweat shop is a dystopian nightmare. But ironically, it almost feels more sinister to imagine children are voluntarily consuming this content out of their own free will (because even slaves have more agency than zombies). I also thought of Black Mirror, as Grady proposed.
Taylor Red is a microcosm of an insipid virus in the greater social media landscape, and it fills me with revulsion. Somehow, I still feel like I need to go deeper down this demented rabbit hole.
I just considered that in the near future, a video like this might be auto-generated by AI just for me, based on my internet footprint. Which would mean that Grady himself is an AI robot. Or maybe that isn't the future...it's actually what I just watched. Hahaha, sweet dear lord baby Jesus help me! Time to go for a walk.
Grady, this video has got to be one of your most outlandish and off the wall videos ever, and I absolutely love it 😂😂
If I have to live in this insane digital entertainment dystopia, at least I'm in it with people like you. Great video.
I was fully expecting that Grady ended up going to one of their shows and reviewing it. And I'm still going do my best to speak that into existence
I full on pictured this in my head!
I will sign that petition in a heartbeat
Yep, that is how I expected this video to end as well. I'm not mad, just disappointed.
@@simdoughnut659 I feel like maybe they're not playing live anymore...
well he had lots of time to go see them live
I'm not a subscriber and I don't listen to country music very often but this is a fantastic video that contributes to show how the byline of music, artistry, media corporation influence, and just consumerism in general all go hand in hand so well. It was mad entertaining and love the way you introduce the topic and the mystery surrounding these women, their rise, and their influence.
@notfiveo I have an album by the archies
Wow really well stated
Completely agree
exactly, took the words out of my mouth
I hope this video does well. I know you've put HOURS into this!
I interned for a country radio station in college. That’s the extent of my familiarity with country music.
I have no idea how the algorithm got this video to my feed. That said, bravo. This was a deep friggin’ dive, and I applaud it.
These chicks scare the shit out of me. Not because they are scary, but to me it looks like they are… being held hostage? Super weird vibes. Something’s off, here.
Their name seems like some kind of SEO-based thing. Doesn’t Taylor Swift have a song called “Red”? Maybe they changed their name to get people to accidentally find that when searching?
The Taylor Swift thing makes a ton of sense. It's similar to how the Beach Boys likely became famous because when shopping for records they were almost always right next to the Beatles in alphabetical order. Of course the beach Boys didn't immediately come off as weird, creepy, and fake like these sisters did.
There's something that's so disingenuous and weird about them that beckons me to learn who the hell is really behind this, and what they must be like in everyday life. I think some people truly are NPCs.
These girls remind me Lillee Jean, a girl who pretended to be successful instagram model but they actually did manage to hack social media algorithms
Yt recommended this video to me (never seen or heard you before, don't listen to country music), but I have to say.... I very much enjoyed going down this rabbit hole with you! Great job 👏
me too. makes you wonder if this guy's expose is a part of Taylor red promotion
me too!
🙋♀️. Same! 😂
@@danielescobar7618 It's definitely part of a Taylor Red promotion now. That doesn't mean that this guy is promoting them on purpose.
Same. Never heard of this guy, never heard of Taylor red. UA-cam kept recommending this to me.
now I can’t stop thinking about this sister group this is so weird, I’ve went to their channel and it is pretty weird, I’ve also tried to find other videos of UA-camrs talking about Taylor red and this is the only video …. So thank you Grady smith you have passed the infection on to me as well now I won’t be able to get any sleep until I find out more about them and why they are so popular yet so unknown 😂😂😂
I screamed when I saw this video because I've been perplexed with them for more than a year now and didn't think anyone knew who they were. I had to block their account because I COULDN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE, I couldn't take the jump scares from seeing them on my fyp any longer. Thanks for this deep dive, I feel validated
Omg I literally selected the “don’t show me this anymore” option because I felt like my brain was melting the moment I saw a glimpse of one of their stupid videos
This video has legitimately made me reflect on how much time I spend on the internet. I'm wasting my life on THIS? What does it say about society that stuff like their content is what makes it big?
Thank you Grady Smith, investigative reporter, for helping me reflect on society and myself.
To me, one of the weirdest sides of the story (and pretty much all of them are weird) is that they initially reached out to Grady with a very musician-y request, to add their song to a playlist. That kind of defeats the theory of them 'not being into music these days'. It almost seems like they have two PR teams, one is doing the 'robovideo' stuff, and one is doing the musical stuff. Basically, they're working two jobs, but what's different from a young musician flipping burgers at McD during the day is that they do that under the same brand.
This is probably it
This was my reading of the situation too. It’s like a company with two separate arms, the music arm & the social media arm. Suspect they might be paying one of those content farm companies to game the system for them re. their social engagement and promo (would explain the pivot to 5 minute crafts-style content, plus all the bots and the weird Spotify analytics), but at the same time it’s obvious they have a few friends in high places… this one’s a real head-scratcher!
My thoughts exactly
My braaaaaaiiinnnn!!!! Why have I spent time looking this up, too?! I had to watch your video for my writing class and now I'm just as baffled as you! lol!
I actually wrote with them a few times when they were pursuing a record deal. It was probably 2016-2017. I don't have anything super helpful to contribute, but I *have* heard them sing and play. I won't comment a lot on that here but I'd say your suspicions aren't way off
interesting comment
I love it when comments like these appear
42 yr old UK Metal Head… got this recommended for like 2 weeks & finally gave in 😅 loved it! Grady you’re a fantastic editor and storyteller! I 💯 agree these girls are playing the algorithm system and fair play tbh I’d probably do the same 🤷🏻♀️💜
No joke I found them a couple of months ago on tik tok and was equally baffled by them. Something about their tik toks made me VERY uncomfortable. The balloon popping low key feels like fetish content somehow. I had no idea they were even a band. So your video is blowing my mind right now. So bizarre.
There’s no way the balloon popping isn’t fetish content
Here i was thinking i found another normal video commentator talking about a random weird thing on the internet. Nope, he actually specifically talks about the genre of music i listen to the least😂 this was a cool video, if i find anything else im interested in on your channel ill definitely watch
This video kept popping up for me which was weird, and I didn't want to get depressed reading about someone having their life ruined. But I finally clicked on it and was really invested.
I really enjoyed your investigation, now they'll probably get another 1 million views from us curious people checking their videos out lol
This video kept popping up for me nonstop too so I finally clicked it 🤔
Same! I finally clicked on it to watch something... anything! while washing dishes lol
yes, we all finally gave in and clicked lol
But it was a good watch!
Honestly same.
Same, I was expecting him to get scammed or something.
This story interests me, and creeps me out. In the beginning of this video my first thought was that they bought followers and viewers, made money and continued that cycle. But it all doesn't add up. You're right, they seem to have no real "interest" in being a country band, or influencers. When they brought up their father and how "helped" them chase their passions, and how they skipped college to pursue this passion, I became increasing skeptical over the whole picture. The small town tours, and fetishy content didn't add up. To me, it really feels like there is someone behind the camera instructing all this. Wether it's a company, family member, or who knows. Someone doesn't want their singing publicized, someone is funding all this, someone is writing the odd scripts, someone is coming up with the video ideas. They don't seem like rude, or foul people, but they know how to work the algorithm, they know how to get sponsors, and make money. It feels SO planned out. The name "Taylor Red", which whenever you Google them comes up with Tayler Swift's famous album. There is definitely a plan we are unaware if, i'm assuming they will at one point die down and vanish like most of these accounts do, but i'll always have my eye on them. Nothing. Adds. Up.
Supposedly daddy is behind it all and its his ideas and thats why its so “marketable”. I got this from reading other comments so, grain of salt.
@@alyssa2796 I honestly think that is a very viable option, the money is obviously coming from somewhere. It could be dad, or some other corporate business.
@@parientedehannamontana5067 "its not fetishy content, kids like to watch those kinds of videos" Okay, but really think about your comment... kids watch colorful/vibrant/goofy video >> video gets a lot of views >> bots spam comment section with links to p0rn sites >> children get curious and click on links + potential grooming victims. Not saying that's exactly what happens every time, but it's definitely one of the methods.
Also, anything can be fetishized. Crushing things (especially with feet) is most definitely one of them.
the taylor swift thing. yes. so much of this makes so much sense
@@parientedehannamontana5067 Balloon popping is a fetish.
When I saw the balloon popping I asked myself "Is this just fetish content?"
When I saw the popsicles I answered, "Yes."
When I saw the ketchup in the face, I felt I needed to shower.
the stuffing things in the leggings is also 100% fetish content.
Yep! And why chase christian country fame when they can make bank making weird videos. Both kids and fetishists watch and they don't need to tour or grind.
this is exactly what i was thinking! it’s fetish content!
Don’t know why this doesn’t have more likes, this is exactly what’s happening
Making fetish videos seems "unchristian". I wonder if they lost their faith?
honestly, my best educated guess from living in the music industry....they signed a super shitty and exploitative contract early in their years (likely from a parent using them as a payday), or their contract was bought out by a social media content farming corp from across seas who is using them as "influencers" when it became obvious they weren't going to be the next Amy Grant.
I'm not fascinated by these girls. I am fascinated by your fascination with these girls -- your quest to follow your obsession and figure it out and how this obsession wouldn't leave you alone. That to me, along with the insight into how social media popularity is structured is fascinating. If this were a Netflix investigative story some executive would find a way to stretch this take out to three episodes and one of the triplets would secretly be a serial killer. If this were Reddit I would give you an award.
LOL wow...... I had the exact same thoughts-- "If this were a Netflix investigative story some executive would find a way to stretch this take out to three episodes and one of the triplets would secretly be a serial killer." like literally from start to finish. A few mins ago before reading the comments I thought "this guy did this so well. this would be such a great netflix documentary if one of them ended up just totally going crazy and killing someone" -lol it's cool that our mind paths were the same.
it would be like the end of one of the true blood episodes and then like it would just dissolve into nothingness like that whole catfish movie
Agreed!!
I love niche investigative journalism for absolutely no serious reason at all
For me, this fascination reminded me of days where I was so obsessed with Alan Resnick and searching about all things he ever made. He's artist, but he makes very liminal-feeling videos and movies, and these girls also had very uncanny valley feeling, so...
I went to school and church with Natalie, Nika, and Nicole. They were nice, but I agree, their videos are weird. Almost like they are robots now. They started as a Christian country band called Red Roots. They can play real instruments, which is more than you can say for most musicians these days. Without giving too much away, lets just say they had the funding and support necessary to pursue music. Even in high school they pulled the whole unison schtick. Their self identity is externally aware and I feel being forced to do everything together kept them from developing normal relationships. That made it an easy choice for them to choose to purse fame over the normal family dynamic. (not saying that's a bad thing) Interestingly enough, I am a twin and when we were in school, our school had the highest number of twins and triplets in the country. We all got called to the playground once for our picture to be taken. I think there where 10 or 12 sets of twins and triplets all just a few years apart in age. In my grade alone there were at least 4 sets of twins including myself. edit: They do preform live. I've seen it.
So what do you think their whole deal is? Why do they make the strange videos?
@@Kat-gp6gj money
@@Kat-gp6gj Same old story of all wannabes. Follow the trends to gain followers then market those followers. However, to build fame that last you need more than just the ability to copy the ideas of others. I think these videos match their talents of arts and crafts and therefore are easy enough to make. They clearly have the down time between their music "career" to dedicate to making shorts. However, I cannot name one act that was successful without focusing on improving their music. They have talent and are capable musicians, but ultimately their songs are bland and don't connect with the audience. My guess is that their music career hasn't paid the bills and after spending years throwing things at the wall, these shorts are the first thing that stuck. Their father owned a John Deere dealership here for years, but sold it after they finished high school and moved to Nashville with them when they left to purse music. I wonder if he still has an active roll managing them. Personally, I like country music that connects and is relatable. For example, when Hank Williams sang about sorrow, loneliness, and despair, he connected with the audience through a shared emotional experience. While NNN, grew up around redneck culture, no one is going to believe for a second that they know what it means to live the lifestyle that modern country music promotes. Spending years chasing fame has left them without the life experiences necessary to connect with people in the genre of music they purse. Maybe if they where making the elevator music you expect to hear at a Starbucks, then that's something you could expect them to know about. The fame chasing and triplet schtick makes them seem like lifeless robots and has kept them from sharing their individualism. People who know them, know they are much more interesting people when they are not together and playing the part of the robot. Their dad is a stand up guy though. He and I got along pretty well back in the day. He was active in our church and I often got assigned to him when we had summer camp and events.
@@Kat-gp6gj Reminds me much of rebecca black. Super rich, very little talent. Super high quality video regardless. But maybe more talent in these girls.... but not a lot of marketability? Not good enough to break through?
@@theterriblegamer1228 but did they actually seem like THEY wanted to be musicians? Everything you've written sounds a lot like children being smashed into their parents' ideals, even to the point of moving them to Nashville. I know so many adult women who are grateful to have escaped their home church and parents (not their faith, just The Church) and that's not even factoring in the red hair and music industry thing. And I'm not saying the dad is controlling them (since looks like they were able to rebrand and eventually stop playing music despite all the, well, sunk cost), just that... parental expectations are pretty intense, especially for young girls in evangelical circles. (Plus, as you pointed out, having to be "Triplets" likely did very much hurt their ability to be normal children socially.)
So many of these comments are coming from a place that assumes continuing a music career is the purest noble goal. Grady is a country music channel, so it makes sense the conversation is about "authentic" country, etc. but I know a lot of former violin kids who didn't get a chance to consider if THEY actually wanted to be musicians until adulthood, either. I didn't go into the career I was certain I loved at 15.
They used to be a group called "Red Roots" and did Christian country music. I was super into them as a kid, i have one of their CDs, I tried finding them a couple years ago and red roots didn't seem to exist. This shocked me when when saw your video lol
That is mentioned in the video :)
Obviously didn't shock you enough that you watched the whole video.
Bots are so interesting 🤔
@@AMurderOfLobs maybe they commented before finishing
@@terra5857 Then they should have waited to finish before commenting, or edited their comment.
Thanks for clearing this up (or at least attempting to.) I’ve seen their cringy videos on Facebook and they drive me crazy. At least you provided something on them.
So cool to see Grady make a different style of video, detective Grady is awesome!
du du doo du doo Inspector Grady
Detective/Inspector Grady has a certain ring to it.
I was the guy setting up their stage when they were Red Roots. I handed that keyboard to Natalie and she said thank you and I was crushin’. Oh, and they sing live and do it well! When it comes to online, their audio is linked to royalties and each time it plays they get money..with that many followers I would use that much copyrighted music too! Did you realize that they changed their name right around the time they were endorsed by Taylor guitars?
🤯
Interesting. That certainly makes a ton of sense. Just mining all that royalty money any way possible.
that makes sense.
This explains everything
Basically, they are focused on marketing and building an audience to sell that popularity to sponsors
This was so validating, because I have had the same confusion and fascination over this group. For a long time I wondered if there were truly 3 of them, or if it was just one person! Their videos feel so so strange. Thank you for this deep dive! I totally wish they just made regular country band content.. I would be a fan. As it is.. all I can do is shake my head! But, for that amount of money, it makes sense they would make this weird content. They probably just see it as acting/false personas and are totally normal in real life. Definitely strange!
Their voices are really pleasant, I really wish they'll make music, it's just like wasted talent
First thing I thought was its just one person.
15:21 "And my determination to find footage of them performing live became the thing that broke me"
This is top tier content. I can't stop dissecting their strange response to your DM. I have literally never heard the phrase "fun sister content." And what can't they believe is happening? Their success? You making a video about them? Wild. I feel a tinge of worry for them, and hope they are okay and are in control of their own lives.
This 100%.
Yeeeah this
The reply was very strange.
Yes. This.
It was just a copy-and-paste reply and was not customized to Grady's DM to them. "Congrats on your UA-cam success!!" was because a lot of kids who have a UA-cam account post at least a few videos of their own, and probably most of the DMs the triplet account gets are requests for an interview or some sort of collaboration. Alluding to "your UA-cam success" is friendly boilerplate and it is a way to say NO to every request without seeming entirely unresponsive. Someone (almost surely NOT a triplet) is going through and copypasting that to every DM they get. If you're skeptical try DMing them and see what kind of reply you get.