Within about ten days, Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour went from having a full bill of opening acts to having none at all.
Four of them walked. A rapper who had already been playing the run was removed by the promoter. And the last of the four to go had been standing on that stage every single night for months, not as a support act but as part of Sheeran’s own set. By the time it was over, one of the biggest touring operations in the world was heading into its remaining stadium dates with nobody scheduled to go on before the headliner.
The money involved is not small, and that is the part that tends to get lost. A stadium support slot is one of the few things in music that can genuinely change a career. You play to fifty or sixty thousand people who did not come for you, you get paid, and if it goes well a meaningful slice of that crowd goes home and looks you up. Artists spend years angling for exactly this. Four of them handed it back inside a week.
It helps to understand what the job actually is, because most people picture it wrong. An opening act on a stadium run is not a guest. They are contracted, usually months in advance, with a fee per show and a production budget they often have to part-fund themselves. They travel with a crew. They rehearse a set built specifically for a stage that size, which is not the set they play in clubs, because a room of sixty thousand people needs bigger, simpler songs and a different kind of pacing. Pulling out of a run mid-way does not just cost the remaining fees. It strands the crew, wastes the production spend, and leaves a hole in a touring schedule that was blocked out a year ago and cannot be refilled at a week’s notice.
It also burns a relationship. The touring business is small at the top. The same handful of promoters, agents and venue operators control most of the stadium calendar in any given country, and they have long memories. An artist who walks off a bill is not just declining one payday. They are making a note in a file that other people will read the next time a slot comes up.
Here is what happened, and it is worth laying out carefully, because almost every account of it starts from a conclusion.
Sheeran has been on the road since the start of the year with the Loop Tour, supporting his album Play. It is his sixth tour and it is enormous: fifty-nine shows across Oceania, Latin America and North America, running most of the year. Through the seventeen shows counted in one mid-tour tally it had drawn more than 750,000 people and taken in something close to 99 million dollars. Sydney alone reportedly grossed around 26 million dollars. Opening night in Auckland drew close to 56,000 people. These are the numbers that make a support slot valuable, and they are also the numbers that make everyone involved extremely cautious.
The tour used rotating openers depending on the region. Among them at various points were Vance Joy, Mia Wray, Myles Smith, Sigrid, the Danish band Lukas Graham and the American rapper Macklemore. Separately, the Irish folk group Beoga had been appearing inside Sheeran’s own set since the start of the tour, playing alongside him rather than before him. Beoga are long-standing collaborators of his; their sound is threaded through some of his best-known songs.
In early September, at a stadium show in New Jersey, Macklemore introduced Hind’s Hall, a protest song he released in 2024 about the war in Gaza, and called out Free Palestine from the stage.
Days later he was off the tour.
Macklemore’s own account is that the removal was not a decision made inside Sheeran’s camp. He said publicly that Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and of Gillette Stadium, had rallied fellow stadium owners to keep him off the bill. That is his characterisation, and it is worth flagging as such.
Kraft responded, and his position is specific. He said the decision was not about Palestinian suffering, which he acknowledged, but about what he described as Macklemore’s broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery, which he said was deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community. He also said he would welcome the chance to sit down with Macklemore and talk it through, on the grounds that both of them ultimately want peace. Macklemore has previously faced accusations of antisemitism in connection with his work and public statements, and has previously rejected them.
The promoter, Messina Touring Group, put the practical problem in the plainest possible terms. Venues had told them they would not allow a concert to go ahead with Macklemore on the bill. If the venues held that line, the shows would not happen at all, and hundreds of thousands of people holding tickets would find their concerts cancelled.
That is the squeeze. Not an argument about a song, but a set of buildings saying no, a promoter contracted to deliver shows in those buildings, and an artist whose name is on the tickets.
Sheeran did not say anything publicly until after Macklemore was already gone, which several people have pointed to as the hinge of the whole thing. When he did speak, he was direct about where the decision came from. He said Macklemore coming off the tour was the promoter’s decision and not his. He said venues had threatened to pull the shows if Macklemore stayed. He said he had tried to mediate, working with promoters and with activists on both sides. He said he was appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine. And he said there was a reason he does not use his professional platform for politics, which is that his audience includes a lot of young people and children from every kind of background, and he wants his shows to be a place of safety and sanctuary. He also said, plainly, that he was not complicit.
You can read that as a reasonable account of a man with limited control over which buildings will host him, or as a headliner declining to spend the leverage that only headliners have. Both readings have been argued in public by people with a genuine stake in the outcome. What is not in dispute is the sequence: the removal happened first, the statement came after.
Then the bill emptied out.
Finneas went first, or first among the announcements. He is a producer and songwriter who has won a shelf of Grammys, most of them for work with his sister Billie Eilish, and he had four South American dates with the tour ahead of him. He said artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed, that he had decided to withdraw from his upcoming dates with Sheeran, and that he stands with Palestine and its people.
Finneas is not a struggling opener. He has an established career of his own, and a body of production and songwriting work with his sister that has collected Grammys and Academy Award recognition. He can afford to lose four shows, which some people used to discount the decision and others used to argue the opposite: that he was the one act on the bill who could take the hit, and took it.
Aaron Rowe, a young Irish singer-songwriter, withdrew from the remaining North American dates. In explaining the decision he pointed to Irish historical experience of famine, occupation and dispossession as the reason the situation was not something he could sit out, and ended with Free Palestine. Similar reasoning was attributed in other reports to Beoga, which is not surprising given both acts are Irish and the argument is a common one in Irish public life; the exact wording has been reported inconsistently across outlets, so take the sentiment as attributed rather than the phrasing as exact.
Lukas Graham are not newcomers either. The Danish band had a global hit with 7 Years that put them in front of an audience most acts never reach, and they had been among the tour’s rotating openers rather than a one-off booking.
Lukas Graham left too, and his statement was the most personally uncomfortable of the four. He said he loves Ed and is grateful for everything they have shared, and that this had not changed, but that he could not put those words out into the world and then carry on with the tour as things stood. He also said money does not give you the right to own the conversation.
Beoga were the last and, in some ways, the biggest loss to the actual show, because they were not an opener who plays for half an hour and leaves. They were built into Sheeran’s set. Their stated reason was that they would not play in venues that, as they saw it, silence anyone advocating for a free Palestine.
There is a detail in Beoga’s situation that makes it sting more. Their collaboration with Sheeran predates this tour by years and runs through some of his most widely played songs, where their fiddle and accordion are a large part of why those tracks sound the way they do. Leaving the tour did not end that history, but it ended the arrangement where they got to stand on stage and be visible for it.
Add it up and the cost is real and specific. Four acts gave up guaranteed stadium fees, the travel and production costs already sunk into preparing those shows, and the exposure that is the entire economic argument for taking a support slot in the first place. For Finneas, who has an independent career and a famous surname, the financial hit is survivable. For Aaron Rowe, who is at the stage where a stadium run is the difference between a career and a hobby, it is not a small thing at all. For Beoga, it meant walking away from a working relationship with one of the biggest artists on earth that had produced some of their best-known work.
None of the four appears to have been forced out. They chose, and they chose knowing what the slot was worth, which is the part that makes this more than a news cycle.
It is also worth being honest about what is unresolved. Nobody in this story got what they wanted. Macklemore is off a tour he was booked on. Kraft’s stated objection, that a pattern of imagery and language crossed into antisemitism, has not been retracted and has not been accepted by the other side. Sheeran is playing stadiums with no support act and no obvious way to satisfy anyone by saying more. The four acts who left have made a stand that costs them and changes nothing about the underlying disagreement. The promoter avoided cancelling shows and absorbed a public relations disaster instead.
There is a version of this story that treats it as a scoreboard, with a winning side and a losing one. That is not what the record shows. What the record shows is a commercial structure that almost nobody in the audience ever thinks about. Artists do not book stadiums. Promoters book stadiums. Stadiums are owned by people with their own interests, their own politics and their own contracts, and those owners can decline to open the doors. That structure is invisible for years at a time and then, when something political touches it, it becomes the only thing that matters.
The tour carried on. The remaining North American stadium dates went ahead on schedule, including two nights at Gillette Stadium, the venue owned by the man at the centre of it, with a shortened bill. Sheeran did not issue a further statement after the four withdrawals. The rest of the year’s dates, running through to December, remain on the books.
What happens to the people who walked is the part still being written. In the short run they lost money and stage time. In the longer run, they did the thing that is hardest to do in an industry built on access, which is to make themselves less available to someone more powerful than they are. Some of them will find that door heavier to open next time. Some of them will find that an audience remembers who left and why.
Either way, all four knew the number on the contract before they said no. That is what makes it a decision instead of a gesture.