Music fans demand Iggy Azalea is ripped of her Billboard rap song award
A growing number of music fans are demanding Billboard Music Awards bosses strip Iggy Azalea of her Top Rap Song honor at this year's (15) prizegiving - because the track wasn't eligible.
The Australian star picked up awards for Top Streaming Artist and Top Rap Artist at the event in Las Vegas, but unhappy hip-hop fans believe she should hand her third gong for her Charli XCX collaboration Fancy back because the track shouldn't have been in the running for the accolade, against the likes of Big Sean and Nicki Minaj.
More than 17,500 people have signed a petition on Change.org
demanding Billboard bosses "Retract Iggy Azalea's Ineligible Award
for Fancy".
A note on the petition site reads: "Iggy Azalea's 2015 Billboard
Award for Best Song has been proven invalid. The eligibility time
period for nominations is March 10th, 2014 through March 2015.
Fancy was released on February 17th, 2014, nearly a month before
the eligibility starting.
"This is unfair to the other nominees in this category, especially
to Anaconda by Nicki Minaj, who most likely would've won. Billboard
did not follow their own guidelines and should have to recalculate
these nominations without Fancy as a nominee."
However, a spokesman for Dick Clark Productions, the company behind
the Billboard Music Awards, insists the fans are misinformed about
the eligibility of Azalea's song, explaining, the March-to-March
period that Billboard monitors is not based on a song's release
date, but its chart performance.