After taking a time-out since 2022, the American Music Awards will return to the air in a new time frame — Memorial Day — as well as from a new city, Las Vegas, and on its new network, CBS.

Dick Clark Productions and the network had teased last fall that the show would return on Memorial Day weekend of this year, but Monday’s announcement solidifies the details, with confirmation that the AMAs will be seen on the actual holiday, May 26, live in all time zones, at 8 p.m. ET and 5 p.m. PT. Besides its CBS airing, the telecast will also be streamed on Paramount+.

No location in Las Vegas has yet been announced, and hosting and other details have yet to be revealed.

The announcement about the show’s airdate said that the Memorial Day holiday berth would not be incidental to the broadcast, indicating a plan for the AMAs to “pay tribute to our country’s troops.”

In the streaming realm, Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers will be able to stream the live feed of their local CBS affiliate, as well as access the show on demand. Paramount+ Essential subscribers won’t have access to the livestream that night but will be able to watch it on-demand the day after the special airs.

The AMA brand has not been completely absent from the air in the two and a half years since the regular edition of the long-standing awards show last aired. Last October, after picking up the AMAs following the end of a long-term deal with ABC, CBS aired an introductory one-off in the form of the “American Music Awards 50th Anniversary Special.” 

That 2024 special drew substantial ratings and marked a big uptick from the poorly rated final installation of the AMAs on its former network in 2022. While an anniversary special versus a regular edition of the show may not have been a strict apples-to-apples comparison, CBS and Clark Productions boasted that the ratings growth between shows marked “the largest year-over-year growth of a music special or award show in the world.”

When the last regularly scheduled broadcast of the AMAs took place in 2022, it was in the show’s traditional fall time frame, on its traditional network and in its traditional city, in the fall from Los Angeles on ABC. The last show was aired Nov. 20, 2022 from the Microsoft Theater in L.A. with Wayne Brady as host. The 2022 show had a 0.6 rating among adults in the key 18-49 demographic and 3.53 million total viewers, a record low for AMAs viewership. 

In the spring of 2023, Variety reported that the AMAs would be taking a sabbatical, with things still up in the air at that time as to whether a deal with ABC would be renewed or the show would move to another network. In the interim, another Clark production, the Billboard Music Awards, was moved into the AMAs’ traditional fall slot.

The AMAs were created by Dick Clark for ABC in 1974, when the network had lost its deal to broadcast the Grammys to CBS and was looking for a new musical event. For a period of time in the 1980s, the AMAs even edged out the Grammys in terms of viewers. The AMAs originally aired in January or February until the switch to the Thanksgiving season from 2003-2022.

Variety parent company PMC owns Dick Clark Prods. in a joint venture with Eldridge.