Booting Macklemore from the tour may have been a blunder for Ed Sheeran — and not just morally.
Macklemore said “Free Palestine” to thunderous applause days before he was iced out of the tour.
In the wake of this decision and Sheeran’s laughably bad statement on the matter, the losses have begun racking up.
Sheeran has lost over 200,000 Instagram followers. He has also lost all of the opening acts from his tour.
Ed Sheeran is shedding fans and supporting acts
In the (approximate) words of Justin Timberlake: “This is going to ruin the tour.”
On Tuesday, September 15, four of Ed Sheeran’s supporting acts for his North and South America tour quit on the spot.
Irish acts Aaron Rowe and Beoga, the Danish band Lukas Graham, and Finneas all took to social media to share the news.
Rowe and Lukas Graham would have reportedly served as replacements for Macklemore, who would have opened for most of Sheeran’s remaining shows in the US.
Beoga had been performing several songs with Sheeran. Finneas was scheduled to join Sheeran in South America.
The series of announcements came only hours after a public statement by Sheeran that was, critics say, so bad that it should be a teaching tool for public relations.
Among other things, he referred to the ongoing genocide in Gaza as “conflict between Israel and Palestine.”
Sheeran spoke of having attempted “to build a bridge” when Robert Kraft and his league of anti-Macklemore concert stadium-owners.
In general, he said “both sides” way too many times, as if this were a theoretical debate or a conflict and not a massive, livestreamed slaughter of entire families and communities.
Sheeran’s empty words, “I am not complicit,” ring hollow. We do not doubt that he believes those words. His critics, however, do not.
The solidarity with the plight of the Palestinian people is no surprise
While Ed Sheeran has lost around 200,000 followers (and counting), the acts distancing themselves from his tour have racked up over 1.6 million combined.
(To be blunt, many people critical of Sheeran are former fans or even current, disappointed fans, but many were already not following him or listening to his music.)
The thing is that no one, including the musician, should really feel surprise at these talents backing out.
Sheeran may be British, but his former support acts skewed Irish.
It is likely no surprise to any students of history to hear that the Irish people, by and large, have a great deal of sympathy for a nation of people who are being subjected to famine, cruelty, and war and are being systematically ground into dust by a more powerful neighbor.
By all accounts, Robert Kraft rounded up a group of stadium owners and insisted that they would bar Sheeran’s tour from playing if Macklemore were part of the package. (Many of these stadiums are not entirely private operations, so First Amendment issues may be at play.)
We fully believe that Sheeran tried to smooth things over. However, not everyone is convinced that he took a stand. Using his own words, it looks like he just wanted to make peace without saying anything important.
There are people in this world who cannot afford to take a stand. Many may feel astonished to learn that Sheeran has an estimated net worth of around $400 million or so. He is not one of those people.
Taking a stand is scary. You speak up against atrocities, and suddenly people like Pink are pretending that you’re missing some piece of nuance or are secretly bigoted or whatever.
But if the support acts — who are not as globally famous or wealthy as Sheeran — can take a stand like this, why can’t the singer himself?
Which disappoints fans more — not being able to see him play in Robert Kraft’s stadium, or finding out that the singer lacks moral clarity?
