MTV VMAs 2026 Drops Best Afrobeats Category After Three Years

MTV has quietly retired the Best Afrobeats category from its 2026 Video Music Awards, ending a three-year experiment that briefly gave African popular music its own dedicated spotlight on one of music’s biggest stages. The category will not appear when the ceremony airs from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on September 27, 2026, according to a BellaNaija report confirming the network’s revised nominee list.

Best Afrobeats was introduced in 2023 as MTV moved to formally recognize the genre’s surging global streaming numbers and its growing footprint on pop radio. Nigerian star Rema shared the inaugural trophy with Selena Gomez for their collaboration “Calm Down,” while South African singer Tyla went on to win the award in both 2024 and 2025, making her the category’s only repeat champion before its discontinuation.

The category is one of nine dropped from the 2026 ceremony, a list that also includes Best Pop Artist, Best Rock, and Album of the Year, and MTV has not issued a public explanation for the cuts. Even so, African artists remain well represented elsewhere on this year’s ballot: Burna Boy picked up nominations in Best Collaboration and Best Latin for his Shakira feature, while Tems is up for Best R&B on the strength of her guest verse with Dave.

Tyla herself had previously pushed back on the “Afrobeats” label being applied to her music, arguing in past interviews that her sound draws as much from Amapiano, pop, and R&B as it does from West African Afrobeats. That tension is part of a broader industry debate over whether a standalone regional category helps African artists gain visibility or, alternatively, keeps their work siloed away from the ceremony’s marquee awards. It’s a conversation that echoed through this year’s 18th Headies Awards nominations as well, where genre categorization was similarly scrutinized.

For now, African artists chasing VMA recognition will have to do so within MTV’s genre-agnostic categories rather than a ring-fenced Afrobeats field. Whether the category returns in future years, or whether its three-year run marked a high point that’s since passed, is likely to remain a talking point through September’s ceremony and beyond.