Petition asks Iggy Azalea to hand back her Billboard award

Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX accept the award for top rap song for Fancy at the Billboard Music Awards. Photo/AP

A growing number of music fans are demanding that Australian rapper Iggy Azalea be stripped of her recent Billboard Music Award.

Azalea won three Billboard awards earlier this month for Top Streaming Artist, Top Rap Artist and Top Rap Song at the event in Las Vegas.

Hip-hop fans, however, believe she should hand her Top Rap Song title, which she won for her track Fancy featuring Charli XCX, back - claiming the song wasn't eligible to be nominated.Azalea beat out artists like Big Sean and Nicki Minaj to win the prize.

More than 17,500 people have now signed a Change.org petition demanding that Billboard bosses strip her of the award.

A note on the petition site reads: "Iggy Azalea's 2015 Billboard Award for Best Song has been proven invalid. The eligibility time period for nominations is March 10th, 2014 through March 2015. Fancy was released on February 17th, 2014, nearly a month before the eligibility starting.

"This is unfair to the other nominees in this category, especially to Anaconda by Nicki Minaj, who most likely would've won. Billboard did not follow their own guidelines and should have to recalculate these nominations without Fancy as a nominee."

However, a spokesman for Dick Clark Productions, the company behind the Billboard Music Awards, insists the fans are misinformed.

He says the March-to-March period that Billboard monitors is not based on a song's release date, but its chart performance.

- WENN