This past week, the nominations for the Billboard Music Awards were released. Fans anticipated seeing what their favorite musicians could possibly receive and what they can expect. Following a complete sweep in all the categories nominated at the MTV Video Music Awards, BTS fans called “Army” were hopeful this past Tuesday.
The band has grown to have major popularity and notoriety in the United States during the past few years. Most recently, their latest single Dynamite topped the Billboard Top 100 at No. 1 following its release. The band’s fans are what some would call hardcore, also having broken YouTube’s 24-hour music debut record with Dynamite and raking in a whopping 101.1 million views in a single day.
Back to the BBMA’s, the band first got nominated for Top Duo/Group. This was an expected nomination for fans following the band’s Best Group win at the VMA Awards. They were then nominated for Top Social Artist, a fan-voted category, which was also expected considering 10 tweets from the band make up the top 30 most liked tweets on Twitter. Initially, fans were confused at the lack of Chart Achievement Award nomination particularly following the success of Dynamite. Further research then showed that the eligibility period ended on March 14, 2020. This means their chart-topping success occurred out of the period of eligibility for this nomination cycle. Soon after fans pointed out how strange it was for their beloved band to not be nominated for Top Touring Artist.
BTS is known for their large stadium shows filled with colorful lights shining in the audience from the fans’ “Army Bombs,” a multicolor light stick. It has also become an ongoing bit on Twitter that other musicians and fans try to brag about their performances and end up using pictures from BTS shows instead of their own. The Billboard Music Awards’ tweet replies were soon filled with screenshots posted by passionate fans asking how in the world were the No. 3 top touring artists of 2019 was not nominated for the top touring category.
Ironically enough, the data the fans were bringing up was collected by Billboard themselves. Their data showed that for the band’s 42 shows, they sold 1,611,963 total tickets, grossing a massive $196,414,822. From the fans’ perspective, these numbers seemed hard to miss. It became even more confusing for them considering the other top artists from the touring list were nominated. It seemed to be the top five from that list excluded BTS and replaced them with The Rolling Stones.
The BTS “Army” was then quick to claim that this lack of nomination came from a place of xenophobia towards the South Korean artists. Unfortunately, this would not come as a surprise to fans as they have seen this type of behavior before. The band has had to deal with their fair share of prejudice — most notably in 2019 when Australia’s “9News” aired a segment criticizing the band with what many have considered to include racist and xenophobic undertones. Not only that, but also fans have often been left wondering why the band is only ever nominated for “Urban” or “K-pop” categories when their music has a variety of influences. They also often bring up why so many of these awards and accolades are western-centric, meaning that you have to do well in the United States, or you aren’t even considered.
Now that the band is doing well in the United States, as well as many other countries, you can understand the fans’ frustration. Billboard has yet to address the situation and any of the claims. You can see a full list of nominations for the Billboard Music Awards, including the ones previously mentioned here.
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