Gregory Brothers Portrait - H 2012
The Gregory Brothers, best known for “Bed Intruder Song,” their 2010 Auto-Tuned version of Antoine Dodson‘s account of an attack on his sister, have teamed with Maker Studios, a media company specializing in promoting YouTube stardom, to ramp up their productions beginning with a series of election-related videos.
“Bed Intruder Song” marked the first YouTube video to make the Billboard Hot 100, a feat The Gregory Brothers may have a better chance of repeating now with the help of Maker Studios. The collaboration with the production company is designed to churn out more videos on their Schmoyoho channel, which has 1.3 million subscribers and more than 450 million views.
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“Going into partnership with Maker lets us make more videos and more music,” Evan Gregory tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They’re not just a production studio. They really get how to have a presence on YouTube.”
Joining Evan in the group are his brothers, Andrew and Michael and Evan’s wife, Sarah. Evan says “Bed Intruder Song” was the high-water mark in terms of having a wider cultural impact. It wasn’t their first song to hit iTunes, though; that claim goes to their “Double Rainbow Song” a month earlier. They’re best known for their Auto-Tune the News series (it only took a second installment to hit the 1 million mark for views on YouTube), which was recently renamed as Songify the News.
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“Auto-Tune is a great word, one of the greatest words in the making of words,” Michael jokes. “It’s also trademarked. We also wanted to brand our videos more around ourselves.”
The first Songify the News content under Maker Studios will be primetime election coverage throughout this month, featured in the video below.
“Our goal is to help them create some great stuff,” said Ben Donovan, co-founder and president of Maker. “We want to help them produce more content and monetize it. Everyone has been a huge fan of them for a long time, so we’d like to see where we can take that.”
The Gregory Brothers are repped by 3Arts and WME.
