Ella Langley has conquered not just the country world but the music world generally this year with her song “Choosin’ Texas.” But for the producers of the Academy of Country Music Awards, this year’s show is all about choosin’ Vegas. Certainly no fight is being picked with the Lone Star state, where the ACM Awards were held the previous three years. For the 61st annual telecast, though, the powers-that-be wanted the show to get back to its roots… and in this case, and maybe this case alone, country music rootsiness means the Las Vegas Strip.
The 2026 ACMs run exclusively on Prime Video, Amazon Music and Amazon’s Twitch channel from 8-10:30 ET and 5-7:30 PT, with live availability around the globe.
There’s a long story behind the ACM’s associations with the west coast, from the org’s founding in L.A. six decades ago to its history of being broadcast mostly out of Las Vegas since the turn of the century. But more than these historic factors, there are practical ones, like how a lot of the artists would rather get on a plane to Vegas than to Dallas, and how some of them already feel at home from having residencies there. The visual and aesthetic possibilities for tying the show in with Vegas are rich, and in a year when global superstar Shania Twain is hosting the ACMs for a first time, it makes some sense to embrace the sense of country/casino crossover that she has embodied longer and better than anyone else.
Executive producer and showrunner Raj Kapoor, whom you might also know from the Grammys and Oscars (he has signed on for the 2027 edition of that show), has his own background in the meeting of this twain, so to speak.
“I had actually worked on Shania’s first Vegas residency when she returned back here, and her ties are so deep with multiple residencies there now,” Kapoor points out. “She has rehearsed some of her tours in Las Vegas. She absolutely loves and has become part of the fabric of the city because she goes to see every show and concert and every hockey game. So, with her being the bestselling female artist of all time in country, collectively we thought she was a perfect fit. She had not hosted the ACMs before” — Twain’s only previous hosting gig was the People’s Choice Awards — “but we love working with icons. We loved working with Reba, Dolly and Garth, and there’s only so many huge names that we can go to, so Shania for us was top of the list. It’s a rare occurrence that Shania has new music out in the marketplace, too” (she put out a new single Friday), “so it was perfect timing for us.”
But there’s no perfect timing quite like the perfect timing of having a country music awards show happen at the exact moment when a rising star, Ella Langley, has the top two songs in the U.S., as “Choosin’ Texas” sits at No. 1 and “Be Her” is at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, a historic first for country on that all-genre ranking. Country also has four of the top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 (Langley’s “Dandelion,” Kacey Musgraves’ “Middle of Nowhere” and two by Morgan Wallen). To say that country music is having a moment might sound silly when it hasn’t not been having a moment in such a long time, but Langley is extending its reach further still into pop fans’ brains right now.
“She is on a rocket launch to space,” says Patrick Menton, a fellow executive producer of th eACMs. “Ella is not only an incredible artist — musically, lyrically, incredible songwriter — but she’s also just wonderful to be around. Sunday night she’s doing a really cool, brand new take on a song of hers that no one will have ever heard before.” They won’t say which, though an ACMs-bespoke arrangement of “Choosin’ Texas” sounds like a strong possibility from the hints… although “Be Her” is also such a monster at the moment that few would be disappointed if that turned out to be the pick. “She’s put a lot of time and and heart into it. We love working with Ella. And to think about it, she was our ACM New Female Artist just last year, and to see what has happened with the artistry, the public reaction, the streams, the sales, and being one of the biggest nominees going into Sunday night, it’s crazy.”
There is some craziness to go around, if you have a thing for female country artists — as the ACM voters seem to, almost in reverse disproportion to the percentages they manage on country radio. There are four female superstars who are especially well-represented in this year’s nominations: Megan Moroney leads the pack with nine, followed by Miranda Lambert with eight and Langley and Lainey Wilson with seven each. (The next runners-up are Chris Stapleton with six nods, Zach Top with five, and Riley Green and Cody Johnson with four apiece.)
Three of those four commanding women will have spotlight performances on the show. Moroney will not be in Las Vegas at all; she announced on her Instagram that she is tied up out of the country, acting as maid of honor in a best friend’s wedding. But Wilson, the ACMs’ defending entertainer of the year, will open the telecast with her latest single, the rocker “Can’t Sit Still.” And the “crazy ex-girlfriend” herself, Lambert — who happens to be nominated for co-writing Langley’s breakthrough single, as well as her own recorded efforts — will be doing the live debut of “Crisco.”
“Miranda Lambert is going more disco because her upcoming album is more disco-country-flavored,” says Damon Whiteside, the outgoing CEO of the Academy and also an executive producer, “so we’re gonna have some fun with those themes with her, which will be something people have never seen.”
The concluding performer of the show will be Blake Shelton. “We’re kinda keeping it a little bit under wraps, but he’s gonna be doing a classic song that everybody will get up and sing along to,” promises Whiteside. Kapoor will only say, “It’s one of the most beloved songs I think that’s ever been written in country music.”
Musgraves has not had a big presence on country music awards shows since she began a turn toward folk-pop with her “Golden Hour” album eight years ago, but her new “Middle of Nowhere” album marks a decided turn back toward pure country in some musical and visual regards, so her presence on the ACMs is big news. Although “Loneliest Girl” is the song that’s being promoted to country radio right now, she’ll be doing her infamous track about being the most-celibate-but-horniest girl, the raucous “Dry Spell.”
Other performers include Zach Top, Cody Johnson, Kane Brown, the Red Clay Strays, Thomas Rhett, Jordan Davis, Dan + Shay, Avery Anna, Carter Faith, Lee Ann Womack, Little Big Town, Parker McCollum, and Tucker Wetmore.
“We have 17 performances. I mean, it is back-to-back,” says Menton. “I still don’t know how we make these turnarounds. God bless our stage management team.”
That’s 17 performances in just two and a half hours, or about 30-45 minutes less than pretty much any other music awards show. Being able to shave a half-hour or more off the usual running time is a function of being a streaming-only show that isn’t beholden to all the commercials of a network show.
The ACMs were the first such major show to go with a streamer instead of one of the traditional big three. At the time, it seemed like a gamble, but with Kapoor’s Oscars gig set to happen on YouTube now, no one will doubt that they were on to something.
“I feel like we were a little bit of the guinea pig, because our first year was in 2022,” says Whiteside. “We’d been on broadcast television since the ’70s, so it was a big, big change. But this is now gonna be our fifth year on Prime Video. It’s been definitely a learning experience, and I feel like we’ve really learned and grown together, like our company working with them. The first year was really eye-opening. It was not easy because we had to really rethink the show format; that first year, we didn’t have any commercials at all. So, typically with an award show, you at least have breaks so that you can reset stages and you can get bands on and off, and you’ve got some transition time. But we had no stops. And it was also two hours instead of three hours, so it was also an hour shorter for fans. Over the last four years it’s evolved. Now, we do have some commercial breaks, but they’re still minuscule compared to broadcast, so it kind of just gives us enough time to have a little bit of buffer. But from a fan perspective, it’s great because it’s just wall-to-wall music.”
Last year they went from two to two-and-a-half hours, and will continue that this year. Whiteside admits that some viewers found the two-hour format too short… one of the few times that’s ever been said of an awards show. “It was very almost shocking at first, like, ‘Wait, it’s over? What? We have that whole hour of our life back that normally an awards show has.’ This year will be two and a half hours, but still a majority of that is real — true content versus commercials — so it still feels a lot tighter and shorter.”
How themed to Vegas will it be? “It’s not necessarily themed, but I think there’s a lot of great moments that will make people feel like we are actually celebrating that city, now that we are back at the MGM Grand,” says Kapoor. “Even what we did with Carter Faith — she did a great rendition of ‘Let’s Go to Vegas,’ the Faith Hill classic, and we used that a lot for our promos. So just little nods to Vegas throughout the evening, including even some really fun presenter moments that are going to happen with artists that are part of the Vegas landscape. The way the whole stage and room is designed will have a little nod to the Vegas experience I think we are bringing to the ACMs. The party is back; the celebration is back.”
“We actually loved being in Texas too,” Kapoor affirms. “So it was kind of an embarrassment of riches” choosing between the two. “We loved our time in Frisco, and the audiences there, the response from the community, the support of the Dallas Cowboys organization… we had a fantastic time. But we turned 60, and it was time to have a new chapter again. The artists absolutely love being back in Vegas. A few of them even have bars in Vegas now. And then actually the whole dressing room area and how artists interact with each other, it does become a really fun party, and I think the parties continue long into the night after the ACMs wrap up.”
Party is unapologetically the operative word for the ACMs, even down to the extent that many of the awards are being announced prior to airtime, to have few speeches on the show when that time could be used for music. Whiteside says the not-standing-on-ceremony aspect is part of the Academy’s roots.
“Obviously with the organization being founded in Southern California, the whole mission of the organization originally was about supporting West Coast country music. So from that perspective, it’s kinda nice to still have a footprint for for the organization and a presence out on the West Coast, where we can really pull from a lot of those states out there, like California and Arizona and states around Nevada,” Whiteside says. “Especially since now our headquarters are in Nashville, it allows us to keep a close proximity to our roots, to our origin of being a Southern California-based organization. So, that part’s really fun.
“The DNA of our show — and the organization, frankly — has always been that we’re the renegade organization. That was kind of how it was formed back in the ’60s. It was formed to be a little left of center. And so we’ve always just been, I think, been able to just make our show feel more like a party. So I think it just fits so well with Vegas just because of the way the show feels. Through the years we’ve had a lot of crossover artists involved, and so iVegas just feels like a really good home that fits with the DNA of the organization.”