Kendrick Lamar and SZA won hip-hop tour of the year Wednesday night at the 2026 Pollstar Awards in Hollywood, where their Grand National Tour was recognized before a room full of touring industry insiders. The award was handed out at the Loews Hollywood Hotel during the centerpiece event of Pollstar Live!, the annual conference that draws the business of live music into one place.
The win put Lamar and SZA alongside a field that also honored Oasis for Major Tour of the Year for its 2025 reunion tour, The Weeknd for R&B tour of the year on the After Hours Til Dawn Stadium Tour, Benson Boone for pop tour of the year on the American Heart World Tour, and Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson, who tied for country tour of the year. Bad Bunny took Latin tour of the year for the Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour, while Olivia Dean was named support/special guest of the year for opening Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet Tour. Morgan Wallen won the first iHeartRadio Pollstar Fan Favorite Award for Live Performer of the Year.
The Pollstar Awards are voted on within the music industry, with this year’s fan-voted honor added as the lone exception, giving the ceremony a rare split between peer judgment and public taste. That mix mattered in Hollywood on a night when the biggest names in touring were measured not just by ticket sales and scale, but by how the industry itself chose to rank the year’s live draws.
For Lamar and SZA, the prize confirmed that the Grand National Tour had already become one of the defining live runs of the year. The larger message from the room was just as clear: in a year dominated by reunion acts, stadium spectacles and genre winners spread across pop, country, Latin and R&B, the hip-hop pairing at the center of the ceremony had won the category that matched the tour’s reach.
