The future of the BET Hip-Hop Awards and Soul Train Music Awards is in limbo. In a recent interview with Billboard, BET CEO Scott Mills confirmed that the two staple awards ceremonies will not return for the foreseeable future as the company works to reconfigure its place amid changes in the media and entertainment industries.
“So for BET linear, we have suspended the Soul Train and Hip-Hop award shows,” Mills said, with BET linear referring to the original cable network. “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. Viewer concerns for the fate of the show increased in 2024, when BET skipped the ceremony for the year without notice. The official social media accounts for Soul Train have not been active since March 2024. The BET Hip-Hop Awards launched in 2006 and has consistently aired annually. The show usually airs in October, while the Soul Train Music Awards have typically been held in November around Thanksgiving.
BET has yet to decide on a path forward for the ceremonies, but will continue to present 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?’”
Mills is still hopeful about the fate of the BET Awards, which launched in 2001, but has faced a steady decline in viewership over the years. In June 2025, according to Billboard, viewership from the 18-49 demographic dropped by nearly 50 percent from the previous year.
“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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For 2026, BET plans to move the show back to its usual time, the final Sunday in June.
From Rolling Stone US
