BET Puts Hip Hop Awards on Indefinite Hiatus: ‘They Aren’t Gone’
The channel plans to retool the show, along with the Soul Train Music Awards.
BET’s Hip Hop and Soul Train Music Awards are going on a break—indefinitely.
“We have suspended the Soul Train and Hip-Hop award shows,” BET CEO Scott Mills told Billboard this week. “But we have a team that’s actively thinking about where those award shows might best live as the media climate continues to evolve. They aren’t gone.”
The Soul Train Music Awards premiered in 1987, while the BET Hip-Hop Awards launched in 2006. BET will continue to air the NAACP Image Awards and the Stellar Awards, a gospel music awards show.
“I would say that it’s less about them being no longer and more about our team having to reimagine them for this changing media landscape that we find ourselves in,” Mills said. “I think what we’re going to see are more people taking franchises and saying, ‘This might have started on linear television, but now I’m going to move it to another space. Do I move it to streaming? Or do I move it to another platform?’”
The flagship BET Awards celebrated its 25h anniversary on air this past summer. Mills confirmed ratings are still down, even while hitting a major milestone.
“Viewership was down. However, the cable ecosystem is smaller today than it was a year ago. That’s just the reality of it,” Mills said. “It was an extraordinary show. And honestly, I attribute the viewership declines less to the declines in the cable ecosystem and more to the fact that we moved the night of the show.”
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