Corinne Bailey Rae at last night's Mobo awards. Photograph: Jo Hale/Getty
When the biggest story about the Mobo awards involves an artist who wasn't even there, the awards' relevance has to be questioned. Beyoncé, the night's big winner, with trophies for best song, video and international female, was booed for not turning up (though her equally absent boyfriend, best international male Jay-Z, wasn't), which the audience perceived as a snub.
The non-attendance of a couple of A-listers would have passed unremarked at the Brits or the Q Awards, which have no problem pulling in famous faces, but not at the Mobos, which tends to attract fewer top names, even when they've won something. British stars always make time for the Mobos - winners Lemar and Corinne Bailey Rae were there last night, along with Ms Dynamite, who came to support her best-rapper brother, Akala - but black music's aristocracy, the Americans, don't seem to consider it worth the trip to London.
It could be shrugged off as their loss, but their absence affects the Mobos' place in the pecking order of awards shows. Ceremonies stand or fall on the amount of media coverage they attract, and that, like so much else today, is dependent on the number of celebrities present, and their status.
With no British urban equivalent of Coldplay or U2, the Mobos are compelled to turn to Americans for the kind of glitz that makes an awards show must-see TV. (Highlights from last night will be shown on BBC1 tomorrow.) Frustratingly for organiser Kanya King, her event doesn't have that kind of pulling power. It appears that superstars will turn up if they're in town - as Jay-Z has done in the past - but won't make a special trip to a country where they sell only a twentieth of the records they do at home. And that's despite the lure of the £10,000 goodie bag given to winners yesterday. The problem with no-shows is exemplified by the coverage in today's Sun - it merits a single column in Bizarre, as opposed to the pages and pages the paper devotes to the Brits.
Even when the Mobos came up trumps a couple of years ago by booking Naomi Campbell and Pharrell Williams as presenters, they were nobbled by both cancelling a few days before. The considerably less prominent rapper Mos Def stood in.
The reason all this makes a difference is that all music awards have mutated from a way of celebrating achievement into an opportunity to "grow" a brand. Every last major award, with the possible exception of the Mercurys, has become a showcase for the brand at large. Even the Mobos aren't resisting an expansion into merchandising and other marketing tie-ins. King's commitment to black music isn't in question, but she has recognised the necessity of raising the show's profile, and has enlisted the former head of the huge National Magazine Company to make it happen. His first task should be enlisting the support of the people who matter - and most of them live 3,000 miles to the west.
