The Moon Person trophy for Best Afrobeats existed for exactly three editions, and now it’s gone. MTV quietly dropped the category from the 2026 Video Music Awards lineup, and the decision has set off a serious conversation about what African music actually gains from being handed its own corner of a Western awards show.
The category launched in 2023 with a genuine splash. Rema and Selena Gomez took home the inaugural award for “Calm Down,” a song that had spent months dominating global streaming charts and crossing every cultural boundary imaginable.
South African artist Tyla then made the award almost entirely her own. She won back-to-back, first in 2024 for “Water” and again in 2025 for “PUSH 2 START,” making her and Rema the only two artists to ever hold the honour before MTV pulled the plug entirely.
MTV has not released any statement explaining the removal, which is its own kind of statement. The category was one of nine quietly retired for 2026, alongside Best Pop Artist, Best Rock, Best Group, Album of the Year, and several others, suggesting this is less about Afrobeats specifically and more about a wider structural overhaul of the ceremony.
That context does not fully settle the debate, though. Losing a dedicated slot still stings for a genre that only just started getting consistent visibility on stages like this one, and the silence from MTV makes it harder to read the decision charitably.
There is also a longer, messier argument sitting underneath all of this. Tyla herself raised it during her wins, pointing out that her music draws from Amapiano, Pop, and R&B, and that collapsing the full spectrum of African sounds into a single “Afrobeats” label flattens a continent’s worth of distinct genres into one convenient box.
That tension has never really been resolved inside the industry. Dedicated regional categories offer guaranteed visibility, but critics have argued for years that they also create a kind of soft segregation, keeping African artists in a separate lane rather than integrating them into the main competition on equal footing.
The 2026 nominations suggest at least some movement in that direction. Burna Boy landed two nominations for “Dai Dai,” his World Cup collaboration with Shakira, competing in both Best Collaboration and Best Latin.
Tems earned a Best R&B nod for her feature on British rapper Dave’s single “Raindance,” placing her directly inside one of the ceremony’s core genre categories.
Whether that counts as progress or just a different kind of tokenism is exactly the argument people are having right now.
Two or three nominations scattered across mainstream categories is not the same as the sustained, structural presence that a dedicated award was supposed to signal.
The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards are scheduled for Sunday, 27 September at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, broadcasting live on CBS and MTV and streaming on Paramount+. How African artists perform across those remaining categories will say a lot about where this conversation goes next.
