Aug 20

Aug 20 The VMAs Have Quietly Dropped Best Afrobeats

Lagos · Thursday 20 August 2026

MTV announced its 2026 Video Music Awards nominations on Tuesday. Burna Boy picked up two. Tems is on the list. And Best Afrobeats, a category that existed in previous editions, is not.

Nobody made an announcement about the removal, because nobody ever does. Categories at American award shows appear and disappear on the basis of internal calculations that are never explained, and the affected genre finds out by reading the list.

What Nigeria actually got

Burna Boy's two nominations include Best Collaboration for "Dai Dai" with Shakira, the official song of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Tems is nominated separately. The ceremony is at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday 27 September.

Look at that Burna Boy nomination properly, because it matters more than the missing category. He is not there in a designated African slot. He is in Best Collaboration, a general category, for a record with one of the biggest pop artists alive, attached to the largest sporting event on earth.

concert stage lights crowd — Photograph: **Nainoa Shizuru** via Unsplash

Two ways to read the deletion

The pessimistic reading is straightforward. A category is recognition and infrastructure. It guarantees African artists a slot, a moment on the broadcast, and a line on a press release. Removing it removes all three, and the timing looks poor given how much attention Afrobeats has drawn to the show in recent years.

The optimistic reading is that genre categories are a holding pen.

Award shows have used them for decades as a way of acknowledging a sound without integrating it. You get your award, in your own room, early in the evening, off the main broadcast. Meanwhile the general categories carry on as before. It has happened to Latin music, to reggae, to almost everything the American industry has ever described as world music.

Reaction to the category's disappearance.

The test that settles it

Whether the artists show up in general categories anyway.

On this year's evidence, one of them has. A Best Collaboration nomination for a World Cup single is a mainstream nomination in the fullest sense, and it is worth considerably more, commercially and culturally, than winning a genre prize would have been.

If that becomes the pattern, the deletion of Best Afrobeats will read in five years as the moment the category stopped being needed. If instead Nigerian artists simply vanish from the VMAs for a couple of cycles, it will read as a door closing.

Genre categories are how an industry acknowledges a sound without having to integrate it.

Meanwhile, at the other show

The American Music Awards have gone the other way. Best Afrobeats Artist is intact there and the shortlist is Burna Boy, Rema and Wizkid alongside South Africa's Tyla and MOLIY.

Which produces the slightly absurd position of two major American ceremonies, in the same season, holding opposite views about whether the biggest musical export of the last decade requires its own category.

Both cannot be right. The interesting thing is that neither decision was made by anyone in Lagos, Accra or Johannesburg, and neither will be.

What "Dai Dai" is, and why the nomination is unusual

The record is a collaboration between Burna Boy and Shakira, released as the official song of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Understand what that slot is worth. A World Cup song is played across a month of the most watched sporting event on earth, in stadiums, in broadcast packages, in highlight reels and in advertising, across every territory that carries the tournament. There is no purchasable marketing campaign that reaches comparable numbers.

Historically those songs have gone to American and European artists, occasionally with a local collaborator added for the host nation. A Nigerian artist as a principal on the record, in partnership with one of the biggest-selling artists in the world, is a genuinely different arrangement.

And the nomination it produced is in Best Collaboration. Not a regional category. A general one, judged against every collaboration the year produced.

A short history of the category that has gone

Best Afrobeats appeared at the VMAs in the early 2020s, at the point where the American industry could no longer pretend the numbers were a passing curiosity. It was, at the time, correctly celebrated: recognition at a mainstream American ceremony, on the main list, for a genre that had spent decades being filed under world music.

Categories at these shows are not permanent fixtures. They are added when a genre is commercially loud, adjusted when the broadcast runs long, and dropped when the calculation changes. There is rarely an explanation, because the shows are not obliged to give one and an explanation would only generate an argument.

So the disappearance may reflect a judgement that the genre no longer needs a ring-fence. It may equally reflect a judgement that it is no longer worth the airtime. Nobody outside MTV knows, and nobody outside MTV will be told.

The Grammy comparison is sharper than it looks

The Recording Academy went the other way, introducing Best African Music Performance in 2024. It has now been won twice by South Africa's Tyla, in 2024 with "Water" and at the 68th ceremony in February 2026 with "Push 2 Start", ahead of fields including Nigeria's biggest names.

Nigeria dominates Afrobeats by output, by streams and by nominations, and has now twice watched the award named after the whole continent go elsewhere. That has produced a good deal of defensive commentary at home and a certain amount of quiet grumbling about whether the category is really about Afrobeats at all.

The more useful reading is that a category with genuine competition is a category doing its job, and that Nigerian dominance of one sound does not amount to ownership of a continent's music.

Why none of this is decided in Lagos

The uncomfortable structural point underneath the whole story: every one of these decisions is made by American institutions, on American commercial logic, with no African input into the process and no obligation to consult one.

Nigerian music has built a global audience without building any of the institutions that adjudicate it. There is no African awards body with comparable international authority, no African chart that the international industry treats as canonical, and no African rights organisation with the leverage to negotiate on behalf of the artists producing the work.

So the genre's status gets decided annually, in rooms in Los Angeles and New York, by people weighing it against broadcast running times. Categories will keep appearing and disappearing on that basis for as long as the only scoreboard that counts belongs to somebody else.

Building an alternative is a twenty-year project and nobody is obviously funding it. Until somebody does, the correct response to a deleted category is the one Burna Boy has arrived at by accident: get nominated in the general categories, where they cannot delete you.

Reporting: Vanguard, Tribune Online, Channels Television and the MTV VMAs 2026 nominations list.