Tour Boycott

Macklemore says he got pulled from Ed Sheeran's tour after Patriots owner Robert Kraft turned stadium owners against him.

Kraft owns Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, where Sheeran's Loop Tour 2026 had booked two dates, Sept. 25 and 26, according to USA Today. On Monday, Macklemore wrote on Instagram that Sheeran told him Kraft had lined up other venue owners behind an ultimatum. Keep Macklemore on the tour, and none of them would host it.

The rapper, born Benjamin Haggerty, shouted "Free Palestine" and displayed images of destruction in Gaza during two September shows at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the BBC reported. He also performed "Hind's Hall," a song written for pro-Palestinian protesters.

Kraft is Jewish. In 2019 he founded the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. He told NBC News his objection wasn't to Palestinian advocacy but to what he called a history of language and imagery "hurtful to the Jewish community." A conversation with Macklemore, he said, was something he'd welcome. Hamas, he added, bears blame for both Palestinian and Israeli suffering, USA Today reported.

Messina Touring Group, the tour's promoter, told Rolling Stone that venues had threatened to cancel shows outright if Macklemore stayed on the bill, a move that would have hit hundreds of thousands of fans, according to USA Today.

Sheeran, in his own Instagram post, wrote that the call was the promoter's, not his. He pushed venues, he wrote, "at length all week to try and build a bridge," the BBC reported. Children fill his crowds, he wrote, and that's why he keeps politics off the stage. "I respect Macklemore's strength of purpose to stand up and shout for what he believes," Sheeran wrote. There's "room for multiple approaches to the same end: peace," he added.

That answer didn't hold the lineup together. Every remaining support act on the U.S. tour quit within hours, the BBC reported. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham and the Irish band Beoga play with Sheeran onstage every night. All walked.

Macklemore, in his statement, wrote that he doesn't count himself among the victims of the fallout. "The victims are the Palestinian people," he wrote, pointing to children killed, starved and displaced. He and Sheeran have been friends for 13 years, he said. This week's talks, though, ended in what he called "fundamental disagreement."

Finneas put it plainly. "Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed," he wrote.