CMT Music Awards Moving to New Date on CBS

After it was announced that the CMT Music Awards will have a new home on CBS beginning in 2022, the network has revealed that the annual show will also have a new airdate. The CMT Music Awards typically take place on a Wednesday in early June, the day before the annual CMA Music Festival begins, but they will instead air in April next year. Entertainment Tonight reports that the 2022 awards will be broadcast on Sunday, April 3, 2022, on CBS.

In the days before the show, CMT will have its first-ever Country Music Week, which will feature special programming and events capped by an exclusive director’s cut of the CMT Music Awards. The show will air at later dates on CMT and various ViacomCBS platforms.

Carrie Underwood is the most-awarded artist in CMT Music Awards history with 23 wins, a total she added to this year with her latest win. The 2021 awards took place in June after the 2020 ceremony was delayed due to the pandemic. This year’s show was hosted by Kane Brown and Kelsea Ballerini and featured a number of world-premiere performances and collaborations including Chris Stapleton and H.E.R., Underwood and NEEDTOBREATHE and Gladys Knight with Mickey Guyton and BRELAND.

CMT shares that the 2021 show saw more than a 10% increase in total viewers and dominated as the No. 1 most social program across all of television for the night. Across the six ViacomCBS network simulcasts, P18-34 ratings saw a +32 percent increase over last year’s event, according to Nielsen Early Ratings.

In 2002, an existing fan-voted awards show was overhauled to become the CMT Flameworthy Video Music Awards, which were modeled after the MTV Video Music Awards and celebrated music videos from country artists. The show also became more production-based and included a number of specific categories highlighting funny, fashionable and patriotic videos, among others, though many of those categories were removed after only one year and others were eventually phased out. The show was renamed the CMT Music Awards in 2005 and now includes traditional categories similar to other awards shows including Male Video of the Year and Female Video of the Year.

The CMT Music Awards have introduced several new categories in recent years including the CMT Equal Play award and the Quarantine Music Video of the Year awards in 2020, which were won by Jennifer Nettles and Granger Smith, respectively, and the Best Family Feature award in 2021, which was won by Taylor Swift. In 2003, the show moved to April but returned to a June airdate in 2009 to coincide with CMA Fest, when many artists would already be in Nashville for the annual festival.