17 performances in 2½ hours

Ella Langley not only took the country world by storm this year, but also the music world in general with her song “Choosin’ Texas.” But for the producers of the Academy of Country Music Awards, this year’s show is all about choosing Vegas. There is certainly no competition with the Lone Star State, where the ACM Awards have been held for the past three years. But for its 61st annual broadcast, the powers that be wanted the show to return to its roots… and in this case, and perhaps this case only, country music’s roots mean the Las Vegas Strip.

The 2026 ACMs will be available 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 world.

There’s a long story behind the ACM’s associations with the West Coast, from the organization’s founding six decades ago in LA, to its history of broadcasting since the turn of the century, largely from Las Vegas. But in addition to these historical factors, there are also practical factors, such as the fact that many artists would rather hop on a plane to Vegas than to Dallas, and that some already feel at home just by having a residency there. The visual and aesthetic possibilities of tying the show to Vegas are rich, and in a year when global superstar Shania Twain hosts the ACMs for the first time, it makes sense to embrace the sense of country/casino crossover that she has embodied longer and better than anyone.

Executive producer and showrunner Raj Kapoor, who you may also know from the Grammys and Oscars (he signed the 2027 edition of that show), has his own background, so to speak, in the meeting of these two.

“I had worked on Shania’s first residency in Vegas when she returned here, and her ties to multiple residencies there are so deep now,” Kapoor explains. “She has rehearsed some of her tours in Las Vegas. She absolutely loves the city and has become part of the fabric of the city as she attends every show, concert and hockey game. So with her being the best-selling female artist of all time in the country, we together thought she was a perfect fit. She had not hosted the ACMs before” — Twain’s only previous appearance was the People’s Choice Awards — “but we love working with icons. We loved working with Reba, Dolly and Garth, and there are only so many big names we can go to, so Shania was at the top of the list for us. It’s rare that Shania also has new music on the market” (she released a new single on Friday), “so it was perfect timing for us.”

But there’s no perfect timing like the perfect timing of a country music awards show right when a rising star, Ella Langley, has the top two songs in the U.S. as “Choosin’ Texas” is 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 from Morgan Wallen). Saying that country music is having a moment might sound strange when it hasn’t had a moment in so long, but Langley is currently expanding its reach even further into the brains of pop fans.

“She’s in the middle of a rocket launch into space,” said Patrick Menton, a fellow executive producer of the eACMs. “Ella is not only an incredible artist – musically, lyrically, an incredible songwriter – but she’s also just a blast to be around. On Sunday night she’s doing a really cool, brand new version of a song of hers that no one will have ever heard before.” They won’t say which, though an ACMs custom arrangement of “Choosin’ Texas” sounds like a strong possibility based on the hints… though “Be Her” is also such a monster at this point that few would be disappointed if that turned out to be the choice. “She put a lot of time and heart into it. We love working with Ella. And if you think about it, she was our new female artist from ACM last year, and to see what’s happened with the artistry, the public response, the streams, the sales and the fact that she was one of the biggest nominees going into Sunday night, it’s crazy.”

There is some craziness going on if you have a thing for female country artists – as ACM voters seem to do, almost in inverse disproportion to the percentages they get on country radio. There are four female superstars who are particularly 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 nods each.)

Three of these four impressive women will make spotlight appearances during the show. Moroney won’t be in Las Vegas at all; she announced on her Instagram that she is out of the country and is acting as a bridesmaid at a best friend’s wedding. But Wilson, the ACM’s defending Entertainer of the Year, will open the broadcast with her latest single, the rocker “Can’t Sit Still.” And the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” herself, Lambert — who coincidentally is nominated for co-writing Langley’s breakthrough single, as well as her own recorded efforts — will make the live debut of “Crisco.”

“Miranda Lambert is going more disco because her upcoming album has more of a disco-country flavor,” says Damon Whiteside, the Academy’s outgoing CEO and executive producer, “so we’re going to have some fun with those themes with her, something people have never seen before.”

The show’s closing artist is Blake Shelton. “We’re keeping it a little under wraps, but he’s going to sing a classic song that everyone will sing along to,” Whiteside promises. Kapoor will only say, “It’s one of the most beloved songs I think has ever been written in country music.”

Musgraves hasn’t had much of a presence at the country music awards since she began a turn toward folk-pop with her album “Golden Hour” eight years ago, but her new album “Middle of Nowhere” marks a decided return to pure country musically and visually, so her presence at the ACMs is big news. Although “Loneliest Girl” is the song currently being promoted to country radio, she will be singing her infamous song about being the most celibate but horny girl, the raucous “Dry Spell.”

Other artists 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 shows. I mean, it’s back-to-back,” says Menton. “I still don’t know how we can accomplish this turnaround. God bless our stage management team.”

That’s 17 performances in just two and a half hours, or about 30-45 minutes less than almost 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 tied to all the commercials of a network show.

The ACMs were the first major show to feature a streamer instead of one of the traditional big three. At the time it seemed like a long shot, but with Kapoor’s performance at the Oscars now set to take place on YouTube, no one will doubt that they were on to something.

“I feel like we were a little guinea pig because our first year was in 2022,” Whiteside said. “We’d been on TV since the ’70s, so it was a big, big change. But this will now be our fifth year on Prime Video. It’s definitely been a learning experience and I feel like we’ve really learned and grown together, as has our company working with them. The first year was really an eye-opener. It wasn’t easy because we really had to rethink the show format; that first year we didn’t have any commercials at all. So, typically with an awards show, at least you have that breaks so you can reset stages and get bands on and off, and you have some transition time. But we had no stops in between. And it was also two hours instead of three hours, so it was also an hour shorter for fans.

Last year they went from two to two and a half hours, and they will continue that this year. Whiteside admits that some viewers found the two-hour format too short… one of the few times that has ever been said about an awards show. “It was almost shocking at first, like, ‘Wait, it’s over? What? We have that whole hour of our life back that normally comes with an awards show.’ This year it’s two and a half hours, but the majority of it is still real – real content versus commercials – so it still feels a lot tighter and shorter.”

What Vegas theme will it be? “It’s not necessarily theme“But I think there are a lot of great moments that will make people feel like we’re actually celebrating that city now that we’re 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 emcee moments that will take place with artists that are part of the Vegas landscape. The way the whole stage and venue is designed will be a little nod to the Vegas experience that I think we’re bringing to the ACMs. The party is back; The party is back.”

“We also really enjoyed being in Texas,” Kapoor confirms. “So it was a bit of an embarrassment of riches” to choose between the two. “We loved our time in Frisco and the crowd there, the response from the community, the support from the Dallas Cowboys organization… we had a fantastic time. But we turned 60 and it was time for another new chapter. The artists are excited to be back in Vegas. A few of them even have bars in Vegas now. And then basically the whole dressing room and the way artists interact with each other, it’s going to be a really fun party, and I think the parties will continue well into the night after the ACMs are over.”

Party is unapologetically the operative word for the ACMs, even to the extent of announcing many of the awards before airtime, to have few speeches on the show when that time could be used for music. Whiteside says the no-ceremony aspect is part of the Academy’s roots.

“Obviously, when the organization was founded in Southern California, the whole mission of the organization was originally about supporting country music on the West Coast. So from that perspective, it’s kind of nice to still have a footprint for the organization and a presence on the West Coast where we can really draw from a lot of those states out there like California and Arizona and states around Nevada,” Whiteside says. “Especially because our headquarters are now in Nashville, we’re able to stay close to our roots, to our origins as a Southern California-based organization. So that’s really nice.

“The DNA of our show – and frankly the organization – has always been that we’re a renegade organization. That’s kind of how it was formed in the ’60s. It was formed to be a little bit left of center. And so we’ve always been able, I think, to just make our show feel more like a party. So I think it fits Vegas so well just because of the way the show feels. Over the years we’ve had a lot of crossover artists involved, and so iVegas just feels like a very good house that fits the DNA of the organization.”