August 9, 2025
The adjustments at BET have probably been triggered by the merger of BET’s mum or dad firm, Paramount International, with Skydance Media, based on experiences.
Two staple packages that target the impression of Black tradition, the BET Hip Hop Awards and the Soul Practice Music Awards, have been indefinitely suspended, which BET’s CEO, Scott Mills, hinted in feedback to Billboard might return through its streaming platform.
In keeping with Rolling Stone, doubts about the way forward for the Soul Practice Awards started to rise in 2024 when the present, which had aired since 1987, was skipped and its social media accounts went silent in March 2024. The BET Hip-Hop Awards are a more moderen innovation from BET, that awards present, a present that branched out from its BET Awards present, started airing in 2006, and just like the Soul Practice Awards, has been aired yearly by the community.
“So for BET linear, we’ve suspended the Soul Practice and Hip-Hop award exhibits,” Mills instructed Billboard. BET linear refers back to the programming on the BET channel, the community’s authentic cable channel. “However we’ve a staff that’s actively occupied with the place these award exhibits would possibly finest reside because the media local weather continues to evolve. They aren’t gone.”
Mills continued, “I might say that it’s much less about them being now not and extra about our staff having to reimagine them for this altering media panorama that we discover ourselves in. I believe what we’re going to see are extra folks taking franchises and saying, ‘This might need began on linear tv, however now I’m going to maneuver it to a different area. Do I transfer it to streaming? Or do I transfer it to a different platform?’”
Though Mills believes that the programming will return, he did notice that the BET Hip-Hop Awards’ viewership sample had been trending down since 2001.
“Viewership was down. Nonetheless, the cable ecosystem is smaller as we speak than it was a 12 months in the past. That’s simply the fact of it. It was a rare present. And truthfully, I attribute the viewership declines much less to the declines within the cable ecosystem and extra to the truth that we moved the evening of the present,” Mills concluded.
In keeping with Billboard‘s reporting, the adjustments at BET have probably been triggered by the merger of BET’s mum or dad firm, Paramount International, with Skydance Media. Mills prevented any direct remark about BET’s place in Paramount’s future pecking order, however lauded the corporate’s place because the main Black media platform.
In a current episode of their podcast, “Joe and Jada,” rappers Fats Joe and Jadakiss mentioned the state of affairs that began in earnest when BET’s founder, Bob Johnson, bought BET to Viacom, ending the community’s future as a Black-owned firm in 2000.
The corporate was subsequently acquired by Paramount as soon as Viacom was absorbed by Paramount International, which had seemed to promote the corporate in 2024, however backed out of the customer’s market after a possible sale of BET was linked to figures like Byron Allen, BET’s CEO himself and a personal fairness group, and even Sean Combs and Tyler Perry.
“This can be a type of gentrification, what’s happening. I don’t know in case you actually wish to ask me about this sh*t,” stated Fats Joe, Vibe reported.
He added, “BET got here up as a neighborhood station for Black folks and concrete tradition. Our man Bob Johnson took the test…he bought it to Viacom Paramount. MTV and them. VH1 and them. Little by little through the years, quietly, they’ve been firing lots of people behind the scenes at BET, and everyone who has one thing to say, they been firing them. And I do know ’trigger I’ve been engaged on the BET Hip-Hop Awards for 3 years. Sh*t was just like the finances, not for me, however the finances simply stored getting chopped and chopped and chopped.”
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