Madonna hasn’t opened the VMAs since Rihanna tied her record
Madonna’s fifth VMA opening breaks a tie with Rihanna, following an album that outsold expectations by a wide margin.
By The Weekend · · 5 min read
Madonna will open the 2026 MTV Video Video Music Awards on September 27, her first live VMA performance since 2003. The number that matters isn't the 23-year gap — it's five. This will be her fifth time opening the show, breaking a tie with Rihanna for the most VMA openers by any artist, and it comes attached to 11 nominations, more than any other act this year.
Eleven nominations is the largest number, but it's not the loudest one
Madonna leads the 2026 field with 11 nods, ahead of Taylor Swift's nine and Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter's seven each. That figure comes from the Recording Academy's awards math translated into a straightforward count: nominations tied to "Confessions II," including Video of the Year for "Confessions II — The Film," Artist of the Year, and Song of the Year for "Bring Your Love." It's her third time leading VMA nominations in a career that includes 19 wins, after nine nods for "Vogue" in 1990 and nine more for "Ray of Light" and "Frozen" in 1998.
Eleven nominations sounds like a comeback number, and in one sense it is — "Confessions II" is her first album in seven years. But leading a nominations tally and winning it are different exercises. The last two times she led, in 1990 and 1998, she didn't sweep either ceremony. Nominations reflect submission volume and category fit as much as they reflect a favorite; an artist with a video, a song, and an artist-of-the-year case built around one rollout naturally accumulates nods across categories that don't require beating the same rivals twice. The 11 is real. What it predicts about September 27's trophy count is weaker than the headline implies.
The chart number is the one that actually moved the needle
"Confessions II" debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in July with 134,000 equivalent album units — a sequel, seventeen years later, to 2005's "Confessions on a Dance Floor," which won the dance/electronic Grammy in 2007. Billboard also reports it delivered her best streaming week ever, a distinct claim from the chart position: a No. 1 debut can happen on a modest week if the field is soft, but a personal streaming record requires sustained daily plays across a catalog that already includes decades of hits competing for the same algorithm space.
This is her tenth No. 1 album. Among women, only Taylor Swift (15) and Barbra Streisand (11) have more. That's the context that makes 134,000 units meaningful rather than incidental — it's not a nostalgia bump, it's a number that sits inside a 40-year track record of actually moving units, not just moving press coverage.
The strongest case against calling this a comeback is the show itself
Here's the counter-argument worth taking seriously: an artist doesn't need a comeback to open the VMAs — she needs a slot, a song, and a producer willing to build a broadcast around her. Madonna's 23-year absence from VMA performance is not evidence she'd been shut out; she simply hasn't chosen to perform there, even while remaining commercially active across seven albums, tours, and a 2023 career-retrospective run. The absence is a scheduling fact, not a decline curve. Conflating the two — treating a 23-year performance gap as if it mirrors a 23-year commercial gap — is the easy mistake the framing invites, and the streaming and chart numbers above are the reason it doesn't hold up.
What's true instead is narrower and more interesting: this is the first time in nearly a quarter-century that the commercial peak (a No. 1 album, a streaming record) and the live-performance choice have lined up on the same calendar date. That alignment, not a resurrection narrative, is what the five-time-opener record actually measures.
Rihanna held the tie. Now she doesn't.
Before this year, Madonna and Rihanna were tied at four VMA openers apiece. Madonna's four came in 1989 ("Express Yourself"), 1993 ("Bye Bye Baby"), 1998 ("Ray of Light" with Lenny Kravitz), and the 1984 inaugural broadcast's "Like a Virgin" — the performance most historians cite as the moment MTV's award show became a cultural fixture rather than a network afterthought. A fifth opener doesn't just add a number; it settles a record that had sat unresolved for years, at a network that has produced only one other artist (Rihanna) with the frequency to challenge it.
The venue matters to the record too. This year's ceremony moves to the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles, the first time the VMAs have been held on the West Coast in nine years — the show last broadcast from L.A. in 2017 from the pre-Kia Forum, hosted by Katy Perry. A West Coast return after nearly a decade is itself a small industry signal: awards shows have leaned east and toward Newark's Prudential Center in recent cycles partly on cost, and a return to L.A. for a night Madonna is headlining suggests the production side saw enough upside in the pairing to absorb whatever that relocation costs.
What the 11 nominations do between now and the Grammys
The VMAs land two weeks before first-round Grammy voting opens on October 12, running through October 22. That timing is not incidental to how this gets read industry-side: a strong VMA night — wins, not just nominations, plus a performance that dominates post-show conversation — functions as an unpaid advertisement to Grammy voters who haven't finalized ballots yet. "Confessions II" is considered a near-certain nominee for Best Dance/Electronic Album, the category its predecessor won in 2007, and a longer-shot contender for Album of the Year, a category where Madonna's only prior nomination was 1998's "Ray of Light."
None of that is guaranteed by an opening slot. What the September 27 performance actually buys is visibility inside a two-week voting window, at a moment when 134,000 units and a personal streaming record already gave the album a commercial argument. The VMA stage adds the cultural one. Spotify has signed on as official audio partner for the performance specifically, promising exclusive content and archival VMA footage tied to the moment — a distribution deal that extends the performance's shelf life well past the broadcast's two-hour runtime, which is exactly the kind of afterlife a Grammy-season push needs.