BET Hip Hop Awards 2024
Paras Griffin/Getty Pictures for BET
The way forward for the BET Hip-Hop Awards and Soul Prepare Music Awards is in limbo. In a latest interview with Billboard, BET CEO Scott Mills confirmed that the 2 staple awards ceremonies won’t return for the foreseeable future as the corporate works to reconfigure its place amid modifications within the media and leisure industries.
“So for BET linear, we’ve suspended the Soul Prepare and Hip-Hop award reveals,” Mills mentioned, with BET linear referring to the unique cable community. “However we’ve a workforce that’s actively eager about the place these award reveals would possibly greatest reside because the media local weather continues to evolve. They aren’t gone.”
The Soul Prepare Music Awards premiered in 1987. Viewer considerations for the destiny of the present elevated in 2024, when BET skipped the ceremony for the yr with out discover. The official social media accounts for Soul Prepare haven’t been lively since March 2024. The BET Hip-Hop Awards launched in 2006 and has constantly aired yearly. The present normally airs in October, whereas the Soul Prepare Music Awards have sometimes been held in November round Thanksgiving.
BET has but to resolve on a path ahead for the ceremonies, however will proceed to current the NAACP Picture Awards and the Stellar Awards, a gospel music awards present.
“I might say that it’s much less about them being not and extra about our workforce having to reimagine them for this altering media panorama that we discover ourselves in,” Mills mentioned. “I feel what we’re going to see are extra individuals taking franchises and saying, ‘This might need began on linear tv, however now I’m going to maneuver it to a different area. Do I transfer it to streaming? Or do I transfer it to a different platform?’”
Mills continues to be hopeful in regards to the destiny of the BET Awards, which launched in 2001, however has confronted a gradual decline in viewership over time. In June 2025, in response to Billboard, viewership from the 18-49 demographic dropped by practically 50 p.c from the earlier yr.
“Viewership was down. Nevertheless, the cable ecosystem is smaller right now than it was a yr in the past. That’s simply the truth of it,” Mills mentioned. “It was a rare present. And truthfully, I attribute the viewership declines much less to the declines within the cable ecosystem and extra to the truth that we moved the evening of the present.”
For 2026, BET plans to maneuver the present again to its standard time, the ultimate Sunday in June.
From Rolling Stone US.