Macklemore is off the Ed Sheeran tour, and he says the reason is a phone call from New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Messina Touring Group, the company promoting the U.S. leg of Sheeran’s Loop Tour, confirmed Monday that Macklemore will not perform on any of the remaining support dates. A promoter is the company that books the buildings, sells the tickets and carries the financial risk for a tour, so when the promoter says an artist is off the bill, the artist is off the bill. In its statement, the company said venues on the upcoming dates had notified the tour that “they will not allow a concert to take place with Macklemore on the lineup,” and that keeping him would have meant canceling the tour and affecting hundreds of thousands of ticket holders.
The statement did not name a single venue or a single owner.
Macklemore named one. In a lengthy Instagram post on Monday, he wrote that Sheeran told him Kraft called ahead of the tour’s scheduled stop at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, a venue the Kraft Group owns. Recounting what Sheeran relayed to him, Macklemore wrote that “Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium.” He went further, claiming Kraft then pulled other stadium owners together and handed Sheeran a collective ultimatum: keep Macklemore on the Ed Sheeran tour and lose access to their buildings, or cut him.
Representatives for Kraft and the Kraft Group have not responded to requests for comment from multiple outlets, and Kraft has not publicly confirmed or denied any part of it. Sheeran’s team has not addressed the claim either. The Kraft account rests entirely on Macklemore’s version of a private conversation and remains unverified on the record.
What is confirmed is what happened on stage. Macklemore joined the Ed Sheeran tour earlier this month as the opening act, playing MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5. At the first show, he told roughly 90,000 people that a big part of why he signed on was so he could stand in American stadiums and say two words that mattered to him, then said “Free Palestine” from the stage. He expressed solidarity with people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and performed “Hind’s Hall” while images of the destruction in Gaza played on the stadium screens. He also told the crowd directly that criticism of Israel is not criticism of Jewish people.
“Hind’s Hall” is a protest song Macklemore released in 2024. The title comes from Columbia University, where student demonstrators occupying Hamilton Hall renamed the building in honor of Hind Rajab, a young Palestinian girl killed in Gaza. The song has been part of his live set since then, and his support for Palestinians goes back years before this tour.
The speech went viral, and the pressure campaign started within days. The Israeli American Council, an advocacy organization, circulated a petition demanding Sheeran remove Macklemore from the rest of the U.S. dates, arguing that a concert is not a protest and that the question is where the line sits when an opening act uses a global stage for a political position. The group StopAntisemitism also criticized the set. The story got a second life when Pink reshared a post calling for Macklemore to be dropped.
In his response, Macklemore was careful about who he pointed at.
He opened by saying that he is not a victim, that Sheeran is not a victim and that Pink is not a victim, adding that all of them have careers, money and safety to return home to, while the people actually paying a price are Palestinians who have been killed, starved and displaced. He said he has known Sheeran for 13 years and considers him a brother, and that the two had several difficult conversations over the past week rooted in love and respect that still ended in fundamental disagreement.
He also described where Sheeran landed. According to Macklemore, Sheeran told him the words “Free Palestine” and the image of the Palestinian flag were “hurtful to a lot of people” he had spoken with. Macklemore says he told Sheeran that if those words were more offensive than the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, the disconnect was not something he could bridge. He said Sheeran could not move off his long standing public position of not taking sides, and acknowledged that taking a side costs artists money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals and access.
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Kraft’s background is part of why his name landed the way it did. He is Jewish, has donated millions to Israeli and Jewish causes over the years, and has organized trips to Israel with current and former NFL players. He founded the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism in 2019 and launched the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate in 2025. The Blue Square Alliance has featured a photo of Sheeran with a blue square pinned to his guitar strap.
Macklemore was scheduled to appear at eight of the ten remaining U.S. dates. Gillette Stadium and Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte are privately owned, while the rest of the remaining stops sit under public or municipal ownership. Sheeran’s tour picks back up September 19 in Philadelphia, without him.
