Your Annual Reminder that the CMT Awards Don’t Matter

Alphabet soup anyone?
The CMAs. The ACMs. The CMTs. The PCCAs (yes, there is a PCCAs now).
None of them come even close to truly recognizing the “best” that country music has to offer in a given year. It’s questionable if any of them truly deserve your undivided attention at all. We feel lucky if they even get around to recognizing anything that’s remotely “good,” let alone “country.” Every once in a while they actually throw a real country music artist in the mix, but it’s commonly as a token.
Only two of these awards organizations actually hold any kind of meaning to an artist’s career, or in the grand scheme of country music at large. The first is the CMAs operated by the Country Music Association, which actually does have some weight behind it. The second is the Academy of Country Music Awards (ACMs), which were originally set up to better represent country artists from the West Coast. Both have been held for nearly 60 years, and both can goose the prospects for artists, songs, and albums.
But don’t mistake it. The CMTs are not real. Even the awkward and fledgling “People’s Choice Country Awards” concocted by NBC and the Grand Ole Opry’s parent company—which will hold their 2nd annual event this year—are still more relevant than the CMTs, because at least the PCCAs are awarding music and artists as opposed to videos, which are just placeholders in a popularity contest.
CMT, or Country Music Television, is where sitcom reruns go to die. Nobody watches it. That’s why they have to put their biggest annual event on CBS. Most of the people in the coveted 18 to 34-year-old demographic don’t even have cable. Many of them don’t even watch TV anymore. As the CMT Awards peddle B and C-level major label country stars, performers like Zach Bryan, Zach Top, the Red Clay Strays, and Wyatt Flores will be trending on Tik-Tok, resulting in significantly more attention and traction.
A bunch of noise has been made about how CMT “banned” Jason Aldean’s video for “Try That in a Small Town” after it stirred controversy last summer, yet now the CMTs have invited Jason Aldean to be a performer in 2024.
It’s all transactional with these people. Nobody stands on principle. You can criticize Jason Aldean just as much for going on the “woke” CMTs after they shunned him for “Try That in a Small Town.” What a lot of people forget is that CMT actually agreed to premier the controversial video on their platform when it was first released. That means they vetted the video, and chose to be a partner in releasing and promoting it. It was only when the heat came down that CMT decided to distance.
Did the CMT ban of “Try That in a Small Town” result in any meaningful damage to the song? Of course not. It’s CMT. Nobody watches it. It was completely performative. If anything, it aided and abetted “Try That in a Small Town” shooting to #1 as the backlash against the attempted cancellation of it resulted in massive support. It’s a great example of how the forces trying to control the content in country music win every battle (banning it on CMT), and lose every war (it went #1 because of it).
Rolling Stone made a big deal about CMT’s reversal in inviting Jason Aldean to the CMT Awards, but they’re one to talk. They put a moratorium on covering Morgan Wallen except whenever he did something wrong, but have since lifted that to promote his tour dates and other stuff. Because again, everyone’s just looking for clicks, views, and clout.
Others are hyped that Tyler Childers, Koe Wetzel, Zach Bryan, and the Castellows are up for big awards. But remember, the CMT Awards don’t matter. In fact, it would be my guess that Tyler Childers or Zach Bryan will win something. This is the CMTs trying to lure in independent viewers who are increasingly making up more and more of the country music population. Don’t fall for it. If you want to hate watch the CMTs, be my guest. But be cleared eyed about what’s happening, namely that the CMT Awards don’t matter.
There is also going to be a tribute to Toby Keith featuring Brooks & Dunn, Lainey Wilson, Lukas Nelson, Sammy Haggar (what?), and Roger Clemens (steroids). My guess is the tribute will probably be pretty good. Will it be worth sitting through a multi-hour presentation of B and C-level mainstream stars to see it? Probably not. This is what YouTube is for.
The CMTs are being held in Austin, TX for a second straight year. Trust me when I say that nobody in the Austin country scene gives a shit about any of this. It’s an anomaly, an outlier, a curiosity, and a reason to avoid downtown on Sunday. The CMTs have as much business being in Austin as Roger Clemens has in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
So no, don’t get excited just because so and so wins such and such at the CMT Awards. They’ll be lucky if it ends up being mentioned on their Wikipedia page. Last year, Kane Brown’s wife won a CMT Award for crying out loud. This is the level they’re at. You’re watching the last dying gasps of cable networks and major labels trying to spin the relevancy of television awards shows in an oversaturated marketplace.
Meanwhile, CMT and parent company Viacom hope you get confused and think you’re actually watching the CMAs, facilitated by the alphabet soup of silly and redundant country music awards shows these days. And if precedent holds from last year when that exact thing happened, many probably will.
April 6, 2024 @ 10:18 am
Oh I’ll hate watch it. And now to ignore this CMT train wreck, yesterday’s releases kinda snuck up and me and in retrospect I think Trigger could have easily declared yet another holiday. John Moreland is back in a big way and returned to his early folk rock sound. Marcus King – holy shit that record is soulful and smooth and not the jammy stuff that kinda turns me off from him. Matt Kozial dropped a great record. And Joe Stamm’s “Allegheny” is next level writing from that guy. It hits hard and deep – as if he’s been studying Gabe Lee and Jason Isbell’s catalogue all day and night.
So screw CMT and their silly awards. We got some truly incredible “manna from the sky” as Trig would say dropped on our head yesterday.
April 6, 2024 @ 10:49 am
I will watch the Toby Keith tribute that is it . Thank god my DVR will record this so I won’t have to suffer through all the pop country crap .
April 7, 2024 @ 8:48 am
There’s a lot more to country music than Toby, yes he was one of the best.there’s great music in old school country music, George Strait, Aan Jackson, Willie Nelson George jones, the problem is people have forgotten what country music is about. There’s no one better than George Strait. You have little big town, Chris Stapleton Scotty (Solo in the cap of my truck) great song.,Damn Strait, Reba, Conway, Martina,so many REAL country music.Get pop and rock out and you’ll have true country music and I’d like to say
I’ll always love you is Dolly Parton, do your research!!!
April 8, 2024 @ 8:40 am
Brenda, outside of Keith Urban wearing a George Jones t-shirt and a snippet of Chris Stapleton playing when the duet with Carly Pearce won an award, the only act on your list that actually appeared last night was Little Big Town….and they hardly warrant a spot in the same breath as the actual country acts you named. I think Flick was saying the only thing worth seeing on the award show last night was the Toby Keith tribute.
Sadly, it wasn’t very good either.
April 8, 2024 @ 8:47 am
Then I apologize for my comment
April 6, 2024 @ 11:37 am
Jelly Roll will have a moving speech
Zac Brown Band will swear and will tell their “haters” off
Lianey Wilson will say “Y’all” and state she is from a small farm town
Carly Pearce will thank the men that broke her heart
Old Dominion will sing about lost love and mid-life crisises.
April 7, 2024 @ 2:48 am
…who’s old dominion?
April 6, 2024 @ 11:41 am
Toby tribute should be great. Tho im sick of Lainey Wilson. Did she even know Toby?
Blake Shelton & Trace Atkins should have been asked since i think they were buddies i think
Guess Lainey will be singing 3 times on stage….
April 6, 2024 @ 9:14 pm
Luke Combs would have been a much better fit for the Toby Keith tribute than Lainey.
April 6, 2024 @ 11:47 am
A survey of friends proved what I suspected..Most don’t watch cable or network T.V. anymore period.
April 6, 2024 @ 12:53 pm
I still say the CMAs are the premier country awards, and better than the Grammys. The Grammys are too random and untethered to anything other than the whims of Grammy voters. At least the CMAs reflect to some extent what’s going on in the industry, for better or worse.
April 6, 2024 @ 3:24 pm
The only actual country music awards show is the CMA Awards. With a wide voting base and a lot of history behind them, it is fair to say they matter. The ACMs are a bit more sketchy because of the prevalence of voting blocs and horse trading. But if country music had a 2nd awards show, it’s that.
What the Grammy Awards are good for is the non-televised, non-commercial categories like Americana, bluegrass, folk, American roots, and blues categories. Lots of folks getting nominations and wins there that the CMAs and ACMs would never touch. But when you’re dealing with all genres, things get muddy.
I thought the Grammys had a great presentation this year, just like the CMAs did in 2022.
April 7, 2024 @ 12:10 am
The Grammys love Willie Nelson & Brandi C.
The Grammys are kinda predictable too
April 7, 2024 @ 12:06 pm
In the end, though, it all seems to boil down to two things. One is, how many of these awards shows does the country music industry really need to validate itself? And the second one is, as always, how many awards do country artists really need to validate themselves?
April 12, 2024 @ 6:22 pm
Trig,
Bill Anderson and Dolly Parton got nominated in one of these ghetto categories for Bills wonderful song. Tell me how that is good or makes sense??
April 12, 2024 @ 7:51 pm
Since CMT picks the nominees for these awards unilaterally, they’re basically used to rope in certain demographics to the telecast. That’s my read on it at least.
April 6, 2024 @ 1:17 pm
I laughed when I heard about the CMT awards. There is NO music on Country MUSIC Television and hasn’t been for years. Toby Keith does deserve a tribute but not sure those picked to do it are the right choices. The first person I thought of when I heard Toby had passed was Scotty Emerick. Scotty played with Toby in his band and also co-wrote many songs with Toby. Scotty should be on that stage in tribute to his friend. I won’t waste my time watching the awards, I’ll wait and read all the comments here. SCM is the best! Thanks for all you do Trigger.
April 6, 2024 @ 1:23 pm
Trig, it’s Wrestlemania weekend.
I have my priorities.
April 6, 2024 @ 1:58 pm
Yep, no reason to watch. Just listen to the artist you want to hear the way you normally listen to them. Though I take offense to the Roger Clements barb. If you don’t think he deserves in the hof I’m not sure you know much baseball especially if you are with guys like big papi being in there but I digress, not music related.
April 6, 2024 @ 2:50 pm
am i missing the joke here? or do neither one of you know it’s Roger CLEMENS? not trying to be a dick here, but you and trig both spelled it clements and trig also went with cements once. probably just some autocorrect stuff, but just thought i should point that out. also, clemens, mcgwire, bonds, sosa, rose, et al. should be in the hall of fame. or they can just keep voting in true legends like harold baines.
April 6, 2024 @ 3:25 pm
I’ blaming spell check.
April 7, 2024 @ 4:42 pm
Don’t bother. No matter how its spelled, he’s an idiot. (No need to debate HOF here, this isn’t an MLB thread. That’s another minefield)
April 7, 2024 @ 5:25 am
I’m with you. The story of baseball, which the hof is meant to tell, cannot be told without the steroid boys. (Note: that argument doesn’t mean I think artists like FGL should go in our country hof someday because they did not make country music and therefore are not a part of its story other than being an adjacent nuisance. The steroid boys still played baseball.)
April 6, 2024 @ 2:44 pm
Well there’s gotta be some mattering going on if there’s a whole piece written on how it don’t.
April 6, 2024 @ 3:28 pm
This is a preemptive strike for when they give Tyler Childers an award and the scensters start telling us about how it’s a breakthrough moment, and when people start commenting about great/terrible the “CMA Awards” are because they’re confused like what happened last year. This will be especially prevalent this year since the CMAs are already in the news surrounding the whole Beyonce thing.
April 6, 2024 @ 3:35 pm
I thought there might be some sneaky agenda behind it.
April 6, 2024 @ 3:37 pm
The main value of the CMT awards to me was the batch of free tapings and concerts, rather than the awards themselves.
When the CMT awards were in Nashville during CMA week, there were all sorts of free things going on. I saw Toby Keith, Chris Stapleton, and Brooks and Dunn with a half dozen guests including Luke Combs all up close and free.
Last year in Austin, CMT had free evening tapings with mainstream stars like Carrie Underwood and Keith Urban, but also two days of free afternoon shows with more indie-leaning acts like William Clark Green and Matt Koziol.
This year, it looks like there’s nowhere near as much going on.
April 6, 2024 @ 4:33 pm
Considering current events in country music, the CMT’s will be the Beyoncé Show this year.
April 6, 2024 @ 7:32 pm
Watch the UFL instead.
April 6, 2024 @ 7:43 pm
I bet the Brooks & Dunn tribute will be great. Remember last year’s Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute with Warren Haynes, Slash, Billy Gibbons, Chuck Leavell, Paul Rodgers, Cody Johnson, Wynonna and LeAnn Rimes? It was fantastic and had nothing to do with CMT (they’ve never aired a Lynyrd Skynyrd music video!).
Roger Clemen(t)s is my all-time favorite baseball player!
The hypocrisy of Jason Aldean knows no bounds. He just opened his third Jason Kitchen + Bar just north of here in Pittsburgh, PA (Nashville and Gatlinburg the other two locations). Why doesn’t he open his bars in small towns like Reba McEntire? There’s something peculiarly hypocritical about people blindly patronizing his bar downtown Pittsburgh and ordering Bud Lights while listening to “Try That in a Small Town.” It’s all just fake outrage for clicks and comment section arguments.
April 6, 2024 @ 8:13 pm
The what?
April 6, 2024 @ 8:24 pm
Don’t they represent what Nashville like compared to say the Grammys though
April 6, 2024 @ 11:34 pm
Maybe I have a controversial mainstream opinion, but I believe this site is, at this point, one of the most influential needle-movers in all of country and roots music… and even more controversial: the only site that can lay a kill on the head of a paid-for Americana narrative.
April 6, 2024 @ 11:49 pm
Bunches of haters here , they , all of them sound as if they’ve been left out. Are they jealous? Have any of them contributed anything to Country Music? Probably not. These posts are weak and don’t represent the majority opinion of Country Music fans. It would be better if they were at least clever. I’m betting that if anyone of these folks were nominated for an award they would be changing their tune. I can hear them now “ Oh! What a great honor! I love CMT❤️ Maybe next year. If these hater’s don’t get a chance to hate themselves silly then why try to make others hate? Times changing for everyone, new era’s, new songs, different people trying to entertain. Damn successful at it too. The world ???? is watching ❤️
April 7, 2024 @ 3:03 am
…the day the cmt awards will be all about the cineastic quality of the short films to the songs, it may be worthwhile considering it as something more than just another celebration of the most bleedin’ irrelevant. chances to see that happening in the forseeable future are very slim however. i mean, who needs another award show, where taylor swift makes everbody else look like clumsy amateurs.
miranda lambert is actually a great actress too.
April 7, 2024 @ 3:58 am
I’m so old, I remember when it was the Music City News awards. Hell I don’t even pay attention to the CMAs much anymore.
April 7, 2024 @ 5:08 am
Hey, one might get to see, AGAIN, Jelly Belly channel Garth Brooks with another tearful crying display. Who would want to miss that?
April 7, 2024 @ 5:26 am
When Toby Keith died I went down the rabbit hole of watching his videos on YouTube. There is one non music video up with Sammy Hagar at Keiths house getting the grand tour and showing it off. They seemed to be friends. Hagar keeps popping up playing with the remnants of the Grateful Dead to boot so seems to be more well rounded than just VH. Interesting he is playing the tribute at the CMTs. Im not about to watch the awards but hopefully can just stream the Keith tribute afterwards….
April 7, 2024 @ 3:58 pm
A friend took me to see Sammy Hagar in 2005 at Detroit’s DTE Energy Theatre,and I enjoyed “the Red Rocker’s” show (“Red?” Sammy’s 76.Shouldn’t he be “the GRAY Rocker?)
Maybe the reason he’ll be at the CMT Awards is that he might have had a long-ago Country collaboration nobody mentions.
Roger Clemens,a Texan,had that tawdry affair (?) with the late,ill-starred Country singer Mindy McCready (I think;please correct me if I’m wrong) allegedly commencing when Ms.McCready was an underage fifteen.Anyway,this CMT promises to be a bit,um,weird.
April 7, 2024 @ 4:58 pm
I won’t bother this year except for the TK tribute.
However I can’t wait for next year to see the excitement of the “Cowboy Carter Sweep’!!!!!
April 7, 2024 @ 5:45 pm
I guess Tyler Childers is a breakthrough artist now
April 7, 2024 @ 7:05 pm
Brooks and Dunn sounded like they had never heard “Shoulda Been A Cowboy” before. Terrible.
April 7, 2024 @ 7:08 pm
Where is Kane Brown in 2024 cmt?
April 7, 2024 @ 7:42 pm
I like the idea of a fan-voted awards show. My problem is the “video” aspect of the nominations – I think it’s too limited. I wish they would revert to similar categories from the Music City News/TNN Awards (and redesign those cheap looking trophies). Perhaps lose the Country People’s Choice Awards and have one fan-driven show. I disagree with Trig…this is the one awards show that should matter, but it needs some work. In concept, good idea, but the execution doesn’t get there.
April 10, 2024 @ 5:43 pm
Kane Brown ? How ’bout Jimmie Allen ?