If you’re going to nominate alt-country acts such as Flatland Cavalry, Red Clay Strays and 49 Winchester at your awards show, wouldn’t it make sense to also nominate the sub-genre’s very biggest stars?
The ACM Awards dipped its toe into the alt-country pool for the 2026 nominees list, but it didn’t go full send.
Read More: Here Are the Nominees For the 2026 ACM Awards
Tyler Childers, Margo Price and Charley Crockett all released landmark albums during the 2025 eligibility period. Zach Bryan‘s With Heaven on Top just missed the eligibility period, but he’s undeniably a big enough star to warrant mentions in the Male Artist or even Entertainer of the Year category.
Jason Kempin, Getty Images
Yet none of those heavy hitters scored a single ACM Awards nomination this year.
A few of them have been nominated before. Zach Bryan has even won a couple, including New Male Artist of the Year in 2022. But there’s a pretty stark disconnect between these artists’ accomplishments and their recognition by the show.
We’re not going to call it a snub, exactly, because we think we know why they missed ACM consideration. Opening up the nominations to top-tier alt-country acts would mean rethinking the whole awards show game.
Why Didn’t the ACM Awards Nominate the Biggest Alt-Country Stars?
The ACMs largely limited their alt-country curiosity to the Group of the Year category in 2026, but not entirely. Let’s take a moment to congratulate two pleasant surprises in the Duo of the Year category: Muscadine Bloodline and Thelma & James.
The simple explanation is that those categories have room to experiment.
With five nominee slots open in any given category (except for Entertainer, which has seven), the Group and Duo categories are the only ones where the ACM can possibly include all the usual mainstream suspects and still have a spot or two open for a dark horse.
Read More: 2026 ACM Snubs, Surprises + The End of an Era
They actually did omit Little Big Town from the Group category this year, which was a shocker in itself after the band had been nominated in that category for 19 of the past 20 years.
Jason Kempin, Getty Images
Imagine how much more earth-shattering it would have been if, say, Jelly Roll had been left off the Entertainer of the Year category in favor of Zach Bryan, or if Charley Crockett bumped Riley Green out of the Male Artist of the Year list.
Read More: The Top 10 Country Albums of 2025
Are the alt-country acts less deserving? If you look at their fan bases, ticket-selling ability and streaming numbers, not necessarily. Critically, these artists are often on par with their mainstream counterparts. Taste of Country ranked Tyler Childers’ Snipe Hunter as the No. 1 country album of 2025, ahead of all the projects nominated for ACM Album of the Year.
Do Alt-Country Artists Even Want Major Awards?
On one level, of course they do. Who doesn’t want a trophy to celebrate their hard work?
But alt-country and Americana acts have historically been a little more leery of industry tradition, and a little bit less willing to play ball. Independent acts have more freedom to speak their mind, and a little less to lose by criticizing the parts of awards shows they don’t like.
Tyer Childers called the Americana format “a distraction from the issues we are facing on a bigger level as country singers” when he accepted his Emerging Artist of the Year trophy at the Americana Awards in 2018. In 2022, Zach Bryan said he never wanted to be considered for a CMA Award. Sturgill Simpson once mocked the CMAs by busking in the street outside the ceremony in 2017.
From the show’s perspective, you can see why giving these folks a microphone on live television might seem like a risky proposition, regardless of their musical merit.
And what if they won a category like Entertainer of the Year but didn’t show up to the ceremony? That wouldn’t make for great TV, either. So much so that the question of whether or not an artist will show up can factor into a nominees list, even for artists who would otherwise be shoo-ins in the big categories.
Read More: Do Country Artists Owe It To Us to Attend Awards Shows?
The biggest example of that is Morgan Wallen, who’s made it clear that awards shows aren’t a priority for him over the past couple years.
If Wallen keeps skipping shows, voters probably won’t keep electing him for high-stakes categories such as Entertainer. And if he continues to dominate by chart and touring metrics, that will mean that nominees lists aren’t reflective of which artists are actually doing the most top-tier entertaining.
Mike Coppola, Getty Images
Which raises a bigger dilemma that also applies to the top-performing alt-country acts. If the ACMs won’t nominate an otherwise-deserving artist because they’re worried about that artist not showing up, or because they fear that the artist will use their TV time to criticize the industry, what does that mean for the legitimacy of the award?
Artist reaction isn’t the only risk the ACM has to consider if they’re nominating alt-country acts for big categories. They also have to think about radio.
How Much Does Radio Success Matter To the ACM Awards?
According to the ACM’s website, radio success is one consideration point along with “consumption, success of music videos, vocal performances, live concert ticket sales, artistic merit, appearances on television, appearances in films, songwriting, success in digital media, and contributions to the country music industry.”
Read More: How Does ACM Awards Voting Work?
But in practice, radio success seems mandatory to win the show’s biggest honors. No one has ever won Entertainer of the Year without considerable success on the charts.
Since the ACMs began awarding a yearly Entertainer trophy in 1971 (five years after the show’s inception in 1966), there’s only been one recipient who never had a No. 1 country hit.
That was Mac Davis, who won in 1974. But he was a pop-country crossover star with multiple No. 1s on other charts and multiple Top 10s on the Billboard Hot Country songs chart.
Over the decades, the norm has been, by a landslide, for massively successful country radio artists to win Entertainer of the Year. In recent years, that’s meant stars like Lainey Wilson, Chris Stapleton, Miranda Lambert, Luke Bryan, Carrie Underwood, Thomas Rhett and Keith Urban.
And for the genre’s biggest alt-country players — Tyler Childers, Margo Price, Jason Isbell, Zach Bryan, Charley Crockett — radio airplay has always been their worst-performing metric. None of those artists have ever had a No. 1 mainstream country hit.
Frazer Harrison, Getty Images
The ACM has similar criteria for its Duo and Group categories, including radio success as one factor. There, though, there’s more wiggle room. The Red Clay Strays are nominated, and their biggest country hit to date peaked at No. 18. Another nominated act, 49 Winchester, haven’t had any big radio hits.
As streaming numbers and social media-led grassroots fandom continue to become larger pieces of an artist’s career, awards shows have taken notice. But to go so far as to give a major artist award to someone who’s become a superstar without country radio’s help? That’s a pretty big jump.
If either of the two major televised country music awards shows would be the first to take the leap, though, we’d bet that it would be the ACMs.
The ACM Awards Have Always Been Willing to Experiment + Take Risks
You wouldn’t necessarily know it as a casual viewer today, but the ACM Awards were originally created to help promote the genre’s West Coast cohort, including artists such as Merle Haggard and Glen Campbell and movements like the Bakersfield sound.
That premise set the show apart from its more traditional, Nashville-based counterpart, the CMA Awards, and the ACMs have typically taken place in West Coast cities such as Las Vegas. The show has since opened up to the same cast of nominees you’d see at the CMAs, but they’ve still maintained an edge.
The show awarded two Entertainer of the Year trophies when Thomas Rhett and Carrie Underwood tied in the category in 2020, for example. In 2022, it also signed a partnership with Amazon Prime Video, becoming the first major awards show to move to exclusively live-streaming.
In fairness, the CMA Awards have embraced some alt-country acts, giving a platform to artists such as Stephen Wilson, Jr. and awarding the Red Clay Strays the Vocal Group of the Year Award in 2025.
Still, the ACMs feel like the better bet when it comes to pioneering new criteria and trends for awarding artists.
The show is clearly paying attention to alt-country, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to create a scenario where an artist who has built their success with minimal industry help can walk away with a top award.
Not yet, at least. Maybe in 2027.
