Bebe Rexha will accept the Global Hitmaker Award at Billboard Canada Women in Music 2026 in Toronto on November 24. The ceremony takes place at Rebel, and the Bebe Rexha Global Hitmaker Award recognises her work across several genres as both an artist and a songwriter.
Billboard Canada’s announcement sets out the date, the venue and the award, and places Rexha inside a wider honouree class for the night. Cardi B and Canadian artist Chxrry are also among the announced honourees, which makes the Toronto ceremony a meeting point between global pop authorship and Canada’s own rising class. iimiTV covered Chxrry’s Billboard Canada Rising Star honour in October, and Rexha’s award sits at the top of the same programme: the hitmaker tier.
What the Global Hitmaker Award recognises
The title fits the shape of Rexha’s career. Her catalogue crosses pop, electronic music, country, R&B, hip hop and dance, and she built her name on both sides of the studio glass. Her songwriting profile includes The Monster, written for Eminem and Rihanna, while her own recording catalogue includes Hey Mama with David Guetta, Me Myself and I with G-Eazy, and I’m Good (Blue), her global dance hit built on the Eiffel 65 sample. An award named for hitmaking, rather than for a single album cycle, is the accurate frame for that body of work.
Billboard Canada describes the honour as recognition of Rexha’s work across several genres and her career as both artist and songwriter. The event is an awards celebration rather than a standalone concert, with the honour presented during the programme at Rebel, the waterfront venue that has become a regular home for Toronto industry nights of this scale.
Dirty Blonde and the independent chapter
The award arrives during an independent chapter. Her album Dirty Blonde is a visual project made during her partnership with EMPIRE, and Billboard Canada describes it as a full-length album spanning hip hop, pop, electronic music, country and Jersey club. That spread is the point. The same cross-genre authorship the Toronto ceremony is honouring is the method of the current album, made outside the major label structure she worked in earlier in her career.
Her live repertoire connects to the honour as well. Rexha performed New Religion at the NRJ Music Awards, and the song sits inside the Dirty Blonde world that this award season is recognising. For an artist whose biggest records have often been collaborations, the Global Hitmaker framing centres her own pen and her own voice as the constant.
Toronto hosts the Women in Music night
For Toronto, the ceremony adds another date to a strong fall of music industry moments on Canadian soil. Billboard Canada Women in Music puts a Canadian stage under a global honouree class, with Chxrry representing the home country’s next wave on the same programme. The November 24 ceremony at Rebel is where Rexha accepts the Global Hitmaker Award, and the full honouree programme is set out by Billboard Canada ahead of the night.
The honouree class around her underlines the programme’s range. Billboard Canada has already named Cardi B its Global Woman for this cycle, and Chxrry, the Toronto-raised singer signed to The Weeknd’s XO orbit, carries the Rising Star honour. Rexha’s Global Hitmaker Award is the third shape of recognition on the same night: not the newcomer, not the headline superstar, but the writer and recording artist whose work travels across formats and borders. Toronto hosting all three tiers at once is a fair picture of how the Canadian industry now positions its awards season, as a room where global careers and local breakouts are measured side by side.
Rexha’s own route supports that framing. She wrote for other artists before her solo catalogue broke, and the hits that followed kept crossing lanes, from dance floors to country radio collaborations to hip hop features. A hitmaker award, decided on the whole body of work rather than one campaign, is the rare honour that matches how her career was actually built, song by song and collaboration by collaboration.
Expect the Toronto room to treat this as both an awards night and a songwriter’s night. Rexha’s catalogue was built in writing rooms as much as on stages, and a hitmaker honour in Toronto, in front of the Canadian industry, closes that loop neatly.
