Looking closely at the top tier of popular music stars is a bit like measuring a coastline. What you thought at first was one solid mass that could be measured from A to B is more like an ever-shifting mess of minor variations. Assumed A-listers’ status is rapidly eroding, while newcomers are building up their section of the beach. The only way to not get lost in the fractals of who’s hot and who’s not is to set a standard of good enough and stick to it. In pop music, that standard is stadiums.
Though “arena” and “stadium” are used somewhat interchangeably by fans, the latter is several orders of magnitude larger. Only the biggest names can fill multiple stadiums on a single tour. Olivia Rodrigo plays arenas, Taylor Swift plays stadiums. John Mellencamp plays arenas, Springsteen plays stadiums. Ella Langley is about to break the record for most consecutive weeks with Billboard’s No. 1 song in the US. She still plays venues that are three to four times smaller than those played by Garth Brooks.
Against all odds, Ed Sheeran is a stadium artist. The English singer broke out with a tender folk hit about a drug addict and made one of the few entries in the “first dance at a wedding” canon released during my lifetime. Outside of the occasional awkward, clubby pastiche, Sheeran is a balladeer who just happens to play to the same rooms as the Philadelphia Eagles. He understands how unlikely that is, and he’s not eager to mess that up.
For proof, just look at Sheeran’s response after billionaire Robert Kraft put the squeeze on Sheeran’s current U.S. tour. The New England Patriots owner strongly objected to the opening act on Sheeran’s tour, Seattle rapper Macklemore, who expressed support from the stage for the Palestinian cause during the first two shows. Messina Touring Group, the tour’s promoter, then booted Macklemore from his remaining dates after Kraft decreed that the “Thrift Shop” rapper could not appear at Gillette Stadium in suburban Boston (which Kraft’s company owns).
Kraft cited Macklemore’s “recent actions … and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community” in a statement shared with Rolling Stone.
Sheeran has scrambled to distance himself as far as possible from the controversy without offering support for either Israelis or Palestinians. He was eager to avoid disappointing his U.S. fans, he said, adding that the people who know him personally “know [his] heart.”
For his part, Macklemore has suggested that Kraft had rallied other stadium owners groups to make sure Macklemore was off the tour entirely. Messina’s statement to Rolling Stone seemed to confirm that, alleging that “venues,” as in more than one, had objected to Macklemore’s presence.
In a post to Instagram, Macklemore declined to blame the headline star. He considered Sheeran to be a “brother,” he said, adding that that Kraft’s would-be boycott had put the singer in a “f**ked up position.” Sheeran offered no such warmth in his own statement. Instead, he scrambled to distance himself as far as possible from the controversy without offering support for either Israelis or Palestinians. He was eager to avoid disappointing his U.S. fans, he said, adding that the people who know him personally “know [his] heart.”
“I am not complicit. I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care,” he said. “Nor does it mean I don’t support causes in my own, personal way.”
In a sense, Sheeran’s response bore an eerie similarity to Kraft’s. Despite his eagerness to keep Macklemore out of his stadium, Kraft tried to strike a conciliatory both-sides tone, as if distancing himself from the obvious implications of his own actions. His decision was “not about diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians or denying anyone the right to advocate on their behalf,” he said. Except hadn’t he done exactly that?
“Too many lives have been lost and there has been too much suffering,” Kraft continued but only sharing selective information and ignoring the actions of Hamas is not honest and only advances more divisiveness and hate.” He wanted “peace for all people,” he concluded.
Unlike Kraft, Sheeran did not set the events of the last week in motion. But it’s difficult or impossible to read his own statement as anything other than a big old dodge, the least-bad way of going along with the money while declining to express an opinion or make a choice.
(Arnaud Finistre/Getty Images) Macklemore at the Goldencoast Rap Festival in Corcelles-les-Monts, France, Aug. 30, 2026.
There might be an alternate timeline in which Sheeran refuses to see his fellow artist bullied off his tour. Despite the considerable inertia built into a traveling show on this scale, Sheeran is his own man. He could refuse to perform. That would be an extremely tough hard choice to make, not to mention a very expensive one. Sheeran himself would then face the fallout of broken contracts and bruised billionaire egos. Would he be invited back for gigs as lucrative as the ones on this tour? Would he still, in fact, be a stadium artist?
Honestly, you have to feel for Sheeran, at least a little. He has more to consider than just his well-stuffed bank account. Shutting down his tour would cut off the income stream for all the support staff who have put their home lives on hold to travel the show. The limited number of U.S. shows means that many of Sheeran’s fans were traveling long distances to see him play. Shut that down, and there’d be plenty of bad vibes to go around. It was undeniably a tough call, and in the end he was willing to let the bosses make it for him.
Is that unfair? Maybe. But it’s hard not to read Sheeran’s statement in that light, especially after Irish musician Aaron Rowe, another opening act, announced that he was leaving the tour to protest billionaires silencing “the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide.”
“I don’t take this decision lightly. Ed has been a friend to me and has changed my life,” Rowe said in a statement. “But as Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation.”
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To be fair to Sheeran, it’s a lot easier to walk away from a supporting role on one leg of a global tour than to risk the entire itinerary going up in smoke. Planned supporting acts like Rowe and Finneas who have have bailed out don’t have nearly as much at stake as Sheeran does. To use the standard expressed above, they are arena acts at best. Their staffs and fanbases are literally not in the same ballpark.
But it’s fair to note that for every Sheeran, who looked at the cost of speaking out and decided it didn’t pencil out, we can find several stars who decided that being on the record with their views on Israel and Gaza was worth the risk. Susan Sarandon was dropped by her longtime talent agency after speaking at several pro-Palestine rallies in 2023. Actress Melissa Barerra lost her role in “Scream 7” for saying that Israel had turned Gaza into one big “concentration camp.” She doubled down on her support of Palestinians even as casting calls dried up, joining anti-war demonstrators in a protest at Sundance in 2024.
“For the longest time, I gave myself value as a human because of my work. So when I saw it potentially ending, I was like, who even am I? And I realized that I’m so much more than just an actor,” Barerra told the Independent.
For every Ed Sheeran, who has looked at the cost of speaking out and decided it didn’t pencil out, we can find several stars who decided that being on the record with their views on Israel and Gaza was worth the risk.
The fame and money of Hollywood stars and famous musicians can certainly insulate from the consequences ordinary might face. No one is snatching Susan Sarandon off the street, as happened to Tufts University grad student Rümeysa Öztürk after she co-authored an op-ed in her college newspaper. Law enforcement aren’t breaking down Barerra’s door the way they did to Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil.
Selena Gomez and Mark Ruffalo joined hundreds of other prominent celebrities in calling for an end to the war in 2023. They weren’t caught up in a mass bottling of Los Angeles and hauled away in zip ties like so many non-famous protesters. But they’ve still taken real risks and sustained career damage by putting themselves out there. Barrera, for example, hasn’t starred in a major Hollywood movie since she began speaking out.
In his announcement that he’d been removed from the tour, Macklemore said he understood why people might refuse to take sides on such a touchy subject.
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“Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I’ve lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed,” he said. “When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn’t leave you in the middle.”
Sheeran may be telling himself that his his hands-off attitude is fairest to all parties and is what the fans want. He surely believes it makes the most sense for his team, and he may be the kind of person who simply prefers not to get involved. But by declining to take a stand one way or the other, by opting for comfort over risk decision, he’s found himself on one side after all: the one that looks at an alleged genocide and shrugs, blaming bad actors on “both sides.” His former tour-mates weighed that choice and decided it was no choice at all.
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Gaza, celebrity and pop culture
