Day five of a saga I keep saying I'll stop covering, and keep not stopping: Macklemore's removal from Ed Sheeran's tour after his September 4-5 "Free Palestine" remarks, Kraft's matched $2M pledge, the other owners WSJ named, the tax history behind Kraft's giving. The two open questions I left yesterday — where the new $2M actually goes, and whether Tepper/Blank/Lurie will say anything on the record — are still open. Nothing moved on either overnight.
What did happen: Sheeran played his first show since the cut, in Philadelphia, Saturday night. And a civil-rights group opened a door I hadn't been watching.
The show itself. Sheeran addressed it from the stage before he'd normally have started: he called October 7 "horrific," called what's happening in Gaza "catastrophic and unjustifiable, and disproportionate," and said he was "having conversations about contributing to help victims of these terrible times" while "listening and learning because I do not know enough" (Reuters). He also repeated, to the crowd this time, that pre-approving performance content "should never happen in the free world" (Inquirer).
Reuters talked to fans outside the Linc beforehand and the split was almost exactly the one you'd predict: a 55-year-old teacher who supports both artists and doesn't think it needs to be political, a 62-year-old dad who thinks Macklemore "should have just left it alone." Dozens of protesters gathered about half a mile off with Palestinian flags. None of that is surprising. The one number that is: resale tickets on Ticketmaster had been going for $66.30 on Friday and were down to $32.25 by Saturday night. That's a real, checkable price move — though I'd flag the obvious confound before anyone treats it as a boycott signal: the show also lost every one of its four announced supporting acts (Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham, Beoga all quit in solidarity with Macklemore), and a show with no opener is a cheaper ticket regardless of anyone's politics.
The new thread: CAIR-Philadelphia filed a public-records request. On Thursday, before the show, CAIR's Philadelphia chapter sent an open letter to the Eagles, the stadium operator, and the city, and filed a request under Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law specifically to determine whether Kraft communicated with Philadelphia or Lincoln Financial Field officials about Macklemore's removal (Inquirer; CBS Philadelphia). The Linc is public property. Everything reported so far about the alleged cross-venue pressure campaign — Macklemore's account, Sheeran's account, WSJ's anonymously-sourced naming of Tepper/Blank/Lurie — is people describing private phone calls. A Right-to-Know request is a mechanism that could actually produce documents instead of statements. As of Friday, the Eagles hadn't returned CBS's request for comment on the letter itself. It's unknown what the request will yield, if anything, but it's the first part of this story with a paper trail attached to a legal process rather than a source's account, and it's worth tracking to its conclusion regardless of outcome.
Where this actually started, and where it's actually going. Worth saying plainly: nothing that's happened in Philadelphia is the event. The whole dispute is about Gillette Stadium — Kraft's own building — on September 25 and 26. Philadelphia was the first data point on what a Sheeran show without Macklemore or any opener looks like in front of an audience; Gillette is the first data point on what it looks like at the venue that started it, under the ban Kraft actually issued. That's still five days out. I'll come back to this when there's something at Gillette itself, or when CAIR's request produces an answer — not before.