The 2025 American Music Awards remains a hot topic in this week’s trending news. Aside from Janet Jackson receiving her lifetime achievement award, and Jennifer Lopez as the host with her page turning looks, fans now have something to say about Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani’s performance.
According to fans, the couple’s performances were not performed live during the Monday, May 26, awards show that aired on CBS. In fact, they were not even present at the show, per social media users.
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TikTok videos from audience members show that Shelton’s performance of his song “Stay Country or Die Tryin’” and Stefani’s medley of her greatest hits were pre-recorded and played on a big screen during the show. They were recorded on a separate day in front of a live audience and seemingly edited in.
Shelton introduced his wife’s performance. One fan noted the performances were recorded live on Saturday, May 24. TV Insider reached out to CBS for confirmation but didn’t hear back.
“When Blake Shelton is ‘performing’ at the [American Music Awards] but there’s no Blake Shelton in sight,” one fan captioned the TikTok video of Shelton. His performance was shown after host Jennifer Lopez opened up the show with a six-minute medley of 2024’s biggest hits, 23 songs to be exact.
The Stefani video, posted by a different fan, was captioned, “Gwen Stefani Live at the AMAs… the live view…” and “We’ve been lied to.” “LIKE WHATTT,” they added. “Why would they say performing live when they aren’t even here??”
Whether other performances were pre-recorded is unknown. The report notes it’s possible that pre-recordings were necessary to allow costume changes and stage production changes in between performances as there was only one stage.
Shelton took to X, formerly Twitter, to respond to the backlash, writing, “Just now seeing these stories about Gwen and I pretaping our performances for the AMA’s. We came and performed when the show asked us to.. Really nothing else to say,” adding a shrugging emoji Stefani later re-posted it.
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