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Aja Romano writes about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.

Despite having the biggest new country album of the year, Beyoncé received a complete shut-out from the 2024 Country Music Awards. Her Cowboy Carter topped the country chart — a historic first for a Black woman singing country — and spent 22 weeks on the Billboard top 200 album ranking. Yet despite the CMAs giving nominations to other pop crossover artists, including Post Malone and Shaboozey, the voting body denied Cowboy Carter nominations in any category.

The rejection marks the second time the CMAs and its audience have clashed with Beyoncé. But while the 2016 backlash over her CMA performance with the Chicks arguably stemmed from tension over the artists’ political identities, it’s hard to chalk this snub up to anything but misogynoir at its most blatant — especially in a year that saw both Malone (in a chart-topping collab with Morgan Wallen) and Shaboozey nominated for Single of the Year.

There are several complicating factors that may have contributed to the CMA’s diss of Cowboy Carter. But it’s also clear that sometimes the simplest explanation may be the truest.

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Cowboy Carter may have suffered from a lack of promotion

The lead single off Cowboy Carter, “Texas Hold ’Em,” had just about the biggest release boost ever — a drop during the Super Bowl on February 11, 2024. That date is important, because while the song immediately lit up the charts and saw significant radio play, it took two days, per Billboard, before country radio stations actually received copies of the song from Beyoncé’s label, Parkwood, via Sony Nashville. As detailed in the industry blog Saving Country Music, the media narrative that swiftly coalesced of country radio refusing to play the song wasn’t actually accurate. Rather, due to the way the song was positioned initially — it was first cataloged as a pop song rather than a country song, and serviced first to pop stations — it took a week before most country stations added the song to their playlists. When that finally happened, on February 20, the song received radio play on 79 country music stations across the country, and debuted atop Billboard’s Hot Country Songs charts. Beyoncé’s label even took out an industry ad to thank them:

Beyonce’s promotional thank you to country stations during the week of the country radio debut of “Texas Hold ’Em.” Country Air Check

As Billboard noted, “Country radio has traditionally been reluctant to play songs that aren’t serviced to them or then actively promoted by the label.” Billboard further pointed out that Beyoncé didn’t heavily promote her 2016 crossover single “Daddy Lessons” either, which may have contributed to its lackluster performance on the country charts at the time.

That lack of promotional energy may have hurt Cowboy Carter in the long run. Although the album was a hit, it slid rapidly down the Billboard ranks and faced tough competition from artists like Wallen and Taylor Swift — particularly in a male-dominated year that saw men sweeping charts and receiving tons of radio play despite a bumper crop of new releases from female artists.

Beyoncé’s label seemed disinclined to promote the album or its songs beyond the initial drops: “Texas Hold ’Em” received no follow-up music video, and Beyoncé did no regional promotion or in-person radio drop-ins to boost the song’s recognition to radio listeners.

Much of this is understandable as falling within Beyoncé’s brand; her superstardom is powered as much by mystique and glamor as her artistry itself. That mystique lends itself to abrupt album drops with little promotion, but not to over-exposure through traditional industry channels like radio.

However, there also seemed to be a deliberate choice on Beyoncé’s part to actively disengage from promoting Cowboy Carter as a country album — quite literally, in that she initially announced it by saying, “This ain’t a country album, it’s a Beyoncé album.” If she intended for her fans to make the argument that, in fact, it was a country album, that tactic worked; fans swiftly got Apple Music to change its initial designation of the songs from “pop” to “country,” and pushed a petition to get the album more radio play to over 27,000 signatures. If industry insiders didn’t feel sufficiently catered to, though, that sense of being overlooked could easily have translated to a lackluster response when the CMA voting rolled around.

There’s another explanation for all of this, though — and it’s the one you’re thinking of.

(Straight) male crossover artists, including Black artists, tend to be welcomed at the CMAs

It’s no secret that the country music industry has a longstanding problem with excluding artists of color. The CMAs specifically famously snubbed first Beyoncé for “Daddy Lessons” (which was itself a musical lesson in the erasure of Black artists from country history) in 2016 and then Lil Nas X in 2019. The CMAs rejected Lil Nas from every musical category while giving him a nod for his collaboration on the song with Billy Ray Cyrus — effectively suggesting that he owed the song’s massive success to a white man and not his own merit.

That this happened several months after Lil Nas came out as gay might also have factored into the equation, given that other straight Black male artists like Darius Rucker have found success and a warm country welcome in Nashville. Artists like Charley Pride and Ray Charles have also broken boundaries in the genre, though the fact they were already huge stars prior to turning their talents to country might have been a factor as well.

The Lil Nas snub also puts this year’s CMAs — in which Beyoncé’s own Black male collaborator, Shaboozey, got multiple top award noms — into sharp perspective. Shaboozey, a Nigerian American multi-genre artist, got a huge boost into the mainstream from collaborating with Beyoncé on two songs on Cowboy Carter, and then saw his single “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” go viral; it was hailed as one of the (many) songs of the 2024 summer and received a record-breaking amount of radio play across country radio.

By first boosting and promoting, and then nominating, Shaboozey’s work on the back of his collaboration with Beyoncé, the industry seems to be sending a message, however inadvertent it might be, that the artistry of Black women lags behind that of their straight male counterparts. That’s quite a statement to make about Cowboy Carter, an album that features country legends like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson.

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But it’s also undeniable that the industry is more hospitable to male pop crossover artists. Post Malone has come under fire for collaborations that appropriate styles from Black artists, a problem that stands uncomfortably next to his collaboration with Wallen, whose incredible career boost following his n-word scandal is arguably an interlinked issue. Yet country fans had little trouble embracing Malone and Wallen’s “I Had Some Help,” and the CMAs rewarded the song with four total nominations.

Meanwhile, while Beyoncé has undoubtedly opened doors for artists including Shaboozey, the progress of Black women in country remains fraught. While the industry has upheld Black artists like Valerie June, Mickey Guyton, and Yasmin Williams, it has yet to bestow CMA awards on any of them. Last year, legend Tracy Chapman and her iconic song “Fast Car” became the first Black woman in history to win a CMA award for Song of the Year — but she did so only because of a white man, Luke Combs, and his viral cover of the song.

In other words, while there may be some logistical arguments behind the industry’s snub of Beyoncé that have nothing to do with identity, the CMA has a noticeable pattern of erasing and sidelining Black women, even in their own art. Beyoncé is actively aware of this gatekeeping; Cowboy Carter is built on the marginalized contributions of centuries of Black artists that came before her. It’s hardly any wonder she distanced herself and her album from the country establishment from the start; she likely knew well before the rest of us that the CMAs were never going to let her in the door — even with the entire world clamoring for her to be let in.

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