Tyla won Best Afrobeats two years running. Then MTV took the whole category away.

The Best Afrobeats award at the VMAs is officially done after just three editions.

It launched in 2023, when Rema and Selena Gomez won the category for "Calm Down," then Tyla claimed it twice in a row, in 2024 for "Water" and again in 2025 for "Push 2 Start," beating a field that included Burna Boy, Wizkid, Rema and Asake.

When the 2026 nominations dropped this month, the category simply wasn't there.

No farewell tour.

No announcement.

No explanation.

It just stopped existing, and MTV still hasn't said why.

To be fair, Afrobeats wasn't the only thing that got cut.

Best Rock, Best Group, Best Album, Video for Good and several other categories vanished in the same reshuffle, while Best Dance came back after seven years away.

So this wasn't specifically an Afrobeats execution.

It was a bigger housecleaning of the whole award show.

That context matters.

But context doesn't erase the optics, and the optics here are rough.

A category created to recognise African music's exploding global reach disappeared in the same era that its winners, Tyla and Rema, have both pushed back against the idea that "Afrobeats" fully describes what they make.

Tyla's sound pulls from Amapiano, pop and R&B.

Rema's pulls from a dozen places too.

Their point, made publicly and repeatedly, is that lumping African artists under one genre umbrella can flatten a continent's worth of musical range into one tidy box.

Some fans are now reading the category's disappearance as MTV accidentally proving that exact point, whether or not that was the intent.

But Burna Boy and Tems didn't disappear from the ballot, and that's worth sitting with too.

Burna Boy picked up a Best Collaboration nod for "Dai Dai" with Shakira, off the FIFA World Cup soundtrack.

Tems landed a Best R&B nomination for "Raindance" with Dave.

So African artists are still getting mainstream recognition.

They're just doing it inside broader categories instead of one built specifically for them.

And that's where this gets interesting.

Is a dedicated category progress because it guarantees a seat at the table that might otherwise get overlooked?

Or is it a soft ceiling, a polite way of saying, "You're welcome here. Just over there in your own separate line"?

Both readings are defensible.

Neither is particularly comfortable.

If you're building anything, a brand, a business or following, there's a version of this tension waiting for you too.

Getting your own category, your own niche market, your own dedicated shelf feels like recognition.

Which it can be in someway.

But it can also become the reason you never get invited to compete for the bigger prize.

The goal was never to win the side category forever.

The goal is to eventually not need one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did the VMAs drop Best Afrobeats? 

MTV has not publicly explained the decision. It came as part of a wider cut of several categories for 2026.

Who won Best Afrobeats while it existed? 

Rema and Selena Gomez in 2023, then Tyla in both 2024 and 2025.

Are African artists still nominated at the 2026 VMAs? 

Yes. Burna Boy is nominated for Best Collaboration, and Tems is nominated for Best R&B.

What other categories got cut for 2026? 

Best Rock, Best Group, Best Album, Video for Good and Best Long-Form Video were also dropped, while Best Dance returned after seven years.

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