American Music Awards: Who Won? No One Cares, Almost No Stars Showed Up for Debacle of CBS Show, But the Ones that Did Got Their Prizes

The Knicks destroyed the Cavaliers tonight. I’m sure the ratings were very high.

In the real world, jazz great Sonny Rollins died at age 95. He was a magnificent musician. God bless him.

In the pretend world of commercial music and network TV, The American Music Awards were aired on CBS but no one cared. Very lame. Few stars showed up. The ones that did got a prize. They included BTS, Katseye, and Sombr, who are all lovely but not important musicians.

BTS — the Korean KPop group — won a bunch of awards but didn’t even perform live. They used a pre-tape on the pre-taped show.

All the big names that were “nominated” skipped the show. That’s Taylor Swift and her ilk like Olivia Dean, Teddy Swims, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter (who won Album of the Year), Justin Bieber, and so on.

Who did show up? Past stars like the Goo Goo Dolls, the Black Eyed Peas, twentyonepilots, and Billy Idol. Yikes. They multiversed in from the 1990s. They all got something called “throwback awards,” which I swear I heard as something else. 

Rolling Stone was so confused they reported the show took place on Sunday night. (see below)

Deadline.com had a headline tonight that could make you cry. “AMAs 2026 Red Carpet Photos: Hannah Berner, Karol G, Ejae, GloRilla, Maluma, Hilary Duff.” Most of the guests were filler from reality shows.

CBS is the big loser. They let the Grammys go, and made a deal with Dick Clark Productions for the AMAs, the Golden Globes, etc — the also ran awards shows that fill the time between the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, and Grammys. I guess they didn’t understand that Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and the like had better things to do.

It’s overall a sad story. What makes it worse is that when the show concluded, no one reported the full list of winners. No trades, not even Billboard. Social media was silent except for paid BTS social media pluggers. The complete list wasn’t issued until about 11:40pm Eastern. By then most smart people had gone to bed.

And Sonny Rollins? The greatest saxophone player of all time entered heaven having never heard of any of these people. He was given wings and a halo.