The nominees for the 58th annual CMA Awards were announced Monday.

To a great degree, they reflect the typical, gradual generational turnover of superstars at the upper echelons of the country music industry. Lainey Wilson and Jelly Roll, who’ve both ascended to popularity in recent years, received repeat nods alongside well-established figures Chris Stapleton, Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen.

It’s the inclusion, and exclusion, of names that haven’t been in the mix in the past that’s generating the most conversation.

One of the big stories in country music this year has been pop stars crossing over. That’s hardly a new phenomenon, but it rarely results in the sort of chart dominance that Beyoncé, Shaboozey and Post Malone have achieved in 2024, both within and beyond the country format.

Post Malone’s duet with Morgan Wallen, “I Had Some Help”— a midtempo number casually refusing to take all the blame for bad behavior — is up for four CMA Awards: Song, Single, Music Event and Music Video of the Year.

Shaboozy’s massive hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” — his savvily down-home interpolation of an early 2000s J-Kwon party-starter — got a Single of the Year nomination too, and Shaboozey himself is a New Artist of the Year contender.

But the album that helped make way for his breakthrough — Beyoncé’s western epic, Cowboy Carter, on which Shaboozey was the only artist to make two guest appearances — received no nominations at all.

While Post Malone’s, Shaboozey’s and Beyonce’s country projects have each, in their own ways, had a potent commercial and cultural impact, Cowboy Carter was created and promoted at a greater distance from the Nashville-based country music industry.

Post Malone made a show of enlisting Nashville songwriters, session players and stars for his album, F-1 Trillion, and the narrative of “authenticity” around it grew both from his eagerness to follow familiar country templates in his music and the relative freedom he enjoys as a white man drifting between genres that interest him in popular music.

Shaboozey didn’t tap into Nashville pros to nearly that degree to make his breakthrough album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, but he did release it in partnership with the label Empire Nashville and performed at CMA Fest this summer.

Next to their efforts, Beyoncé’s concept album registered more as an expansive critique of the country music industry’s insularity — and the lack of welcome when she performed on the CMAs back in 2016.