• Burna Boy and Tems are among the Nigerian artists nominated at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards.
• Best Afrobeats, a category introduced only three editions ago, is absent from this year’s VMA nominations.
• The change has reopened a familiar question: is global recognition expanding Afrobeats, or packaging it whenever convenient?
Burna Boy and Tems are still in the VMA conversation. The category built specifically around Afrobeats is not.
The nominations are good news on their own. Nigerian stars are still being recognised in one of pop music’s loudest global award spaces. But the 2026 MTV VMA list carries another message that has travelled just as fast: Best Afrobeats is absent.
Channels Television reported that Burna Boy received two nominations and Tems one, while the Afrobeats category that appeared in the previous three editions did not return on this year’s list.
The nominations still matter
A nomination outside a genre bracket can be a stronger kind of visibility. It puts Nigerian artists into wider conversations about video, collaboration and mainstream pop. Burna Boy and Tems have done that work for years, building audiences that do not need a special category to know their names.
But categories also do something practical. They create a regular global stage where artists, producers and fans can see the genre acknowledged on its own terms. Removing that stage so quickly makes the recognition feel less settled than the music’s influence suggests.
Afrobeats is bigger than one award show
MTV did not create Afrobeats, and it cannot decide whether the sound matters. Nigerian artists, DJs, producers and fans built the culture through clubs, radio, streets, streaming and constant reinvention long before the VMAs added a category.
Still, awards shape the global record. They influence who gets positioned as a breakthrough, whose work is archived and which genre gets treated as a permanent part of pop rather than a trend of the moment.
The sharpest response may be to keep asking for more than a guest seat. Nigerian music has already proved it can travel. The next demand is that the institutions benefiting from that travel learn to treat the culture as more than a seasonal add-on.
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Do you see the missing category as a setback, or do bigger nominations show Afrobeats no longer needs one lane? Tell us in the comments.
