The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards air live tonight from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, and for the first time in three years, there is no Best Afrobeats category on the ballot. Burna Boy and Tems are still in the room, but they are competing tonight in Best Collaboration, Best Latin and Best R&B, not in a lane built for Nigerian and African sound. The category MTV created in 2023 to recognise Afrobeats’ commercial rise has been quietly retired, and no artist will follow Rema or Tyla as its next winner because there will not be a next winner.
Three Years, Two Names, Then Nothing
Best Afrobeats had a short, tight history. Rema and Selena Gomez won the inaugural award in 2023 for “Calm Down.” Tyla then took it in both 2024 and 2025, first for “Water” and then for “Push 2 Start,” making her the category’s only repeat winner and, in effect, its final one. MTV cut the award along with eight others, including Best Pop Artist, Best Rock and Album of the Year, as part of a wider restructuring of the show’s categories for 2026. The network has not issued a statement explaining why Afrobeats specifically was among the categories to go, and outlets including BellaNaija, Legit.ng and DancehallMag, all reporting independently in the days after nominations dropped on August 18, confirm the same basic facts: no explanation, no replacement category, and Rema and Tyla as the only two names who will ever hold the title.
Where Burna Boy and Tems Land Instead
Nigerian representation at this year’s show did not disappear, it just moved. Burna Boy picked up two nominations for “Dai Dai,” his collaboration with Shakira built around the 2026 FIFA World Cup, landing in Best Collaboration and Best Latin. Tems earned a Best R&B nomination for her feature on British rapper Dave’s “Raindance.” Both nominations are corroborated across BellaNaija, Legit.ng and DancehallMag’s separate write-ups of the full nominations list.
Worth sitting with: neither Nigerian nomination this year is for a solo Afrobeats record. Burna Boy is nominated for a World Cup collaboration with a Colombian pop star, filed under Latin. Tems is nominated for a feature on a British rapper’s R&B single. The two Nigerian names on tonight’s ballot got there by showing up on other people’s records in other genres’ categories, which is either proof that Afrobeats artists can compete anywhere or a quiet illustration of exactly the gap the now-cancelled category existed to paper over, depending on which side of the argument you’re on.
Integration or Erasure
The reaction split along a predictable line. One side argues that folding African artists into the main categories is the actual endgame, that a regional bracket was always a starting accommodation rather than a permanent home, and that competing against Madonna and Taylor Swift for the big awards is the real marker of arrival. The other side points out that Best Afrobeats existed for exactly three award cycles before being cut, that its removal came right after Tyla’s back-to-back wins reopened a familiar argument about how the category gets defined and who gets to win it, and that “integration” without a guaranteed seat can just as easily mean fewer Nigerian and African names getting nominated at all in a given year, not more. Notably, Tyla herself used a past VMA acceptance speech to push back on lumping distinct African sounds under one Afrobeats umbrella, so even the category’s most successful winner had reservations about how it was built. MTV’s silence on its reasoning leaves both readings standing.
What Lagos Should Actually Watch For
The practical test isn’t tonight, it’s next year’s nominations list. If Nigerian and African artists keep landing multiple nominations across Best Collaboration, Best Pop, Best R&B and the rest of the main board the way Burna Boy and Tems did this cycle, the removal will look like genuine mainstreaming. If the count of African names on the full ballot quietly shrinks now that there’s no dedicated category obligating MTV to feature them, it will look like a rollback dressed up as progress. Either way, the underlying commercial reality that got Afrobeats a category in the first place hasn’t gone anywhere: Nigerian records keep charting internationally, Nigerian artists keep landing global collaborations like Burna Boy’s World Cup single, and the streaming and licensing money behind those records is real whether or not there’s a trophy category attached to it. A cancelled award category doesn’t change what Boomplay, Audiomack or Spotify’s charts are already showing about where the audience is.
The Take
Award categories are marketing decisions dressed up as recognition, and MTV cutting nine of them at once, Afrobeats among them, is the network trimming its own broadcast rather than making a statement about African music’s standing. But timing matters, and cutting the one category that consistently featured Nigerian and African artists in the same cycle where Burna Boy and Tems can still only get nominated via collaborations and features, not standalone Afrobeats records, is a coincidence worth watching rather than dismissing. Tonight’s show will tell us who wins where. Next year’s nominations list will tell us whether Nigerian artists actually gained a bigger stage or just lost the one guaranteed seat they had on it.
