Fans are split between two theories, and the singer’s team has said nothing
At a glance
- What happened: Asake’s September 6 concert at The Greek Theatre in Los Angeles was cancelled days before showtime
- Reason given: None. The cancellation notice offered no explanation
- Refunds: Automatic, back to the card used, within 5 business days plus 2 to 3 days to clear
- Tour status: The remaining In God We Trust World Tour continues, with London’s O2 on October 15 and Paris’s Accor Arena on October 24 still listed
- The debate: Fans are split between claims of low ticket sales and unconfirmed talk that his band was unavailable, and neither has been confirmed by Asake or his team
An Asake concert cancellation has become the biggest Afrobeats story of the week. Asake planned to close out the North American leg of his In God We Trust World Tour at The Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday, September 6. Days before showtime, the show quietly disappeared from the schedule.
Ticket holders received a notice explaining only that organizers had called off the event. It promised refunds back to the original payment card within five business days, plus two to three more days for the funds to clear. The notice gave no reason. Neither Asake nor anyone on his team has addressed the cancellation publicly. That silence created a vacuum, and fans rushed to fill it.
One camp on TikTok and X blames soft ticket sales in the Los Angeles market. A second camp pushes back hard. They insist the show was close to selling out before organizers pulled it. A third theory has also gained traction: unconfirmed talk that Asake’s backing band couldn’t make the date. Nobody connected to the tour, Asake included, has confirmed any of the three explanations. For now, they remain rumors rather than fact, a pattern Rolling Stone has tracked across several high-profile Afrobeats tour disruptions this year.
The tour itself tells a clearer story. The Los Angeles show was one stop on a 13-city run that opened at Afro Nation Portugal on July 4. From there, the tour crossed into North America with dates in Chicago, Toronto, Laval, Brooklyn, Lowell, Columbia, Atlanta, Miami and Houston. Swazi DJ and producer Uncle Waffles joined several stops as a special guest. The tour supports Asake’s fourth studio album, M$NEY, released May 1. London’s O2 and Paris’s Accor Arena both still list their October dates as active, according to each venue’s official site, which means this Asake concert cancellation hasn’t derailed the broader run.
What the Asake concert cancellation means for fans
Cancellations at this scale rarely happen to an artist of Asake’s stature. He has filled arenas as large as London’s O2 and New York’s Madison Square Garden. Los Angeles ranks among North America’s biggest Afrobeats markets, home to a large Nigerian diaspora and a fan base that helped push the genre into the American mainstream. Losing a date there matters, even with the tour marching on elsewhere.
The DMV has its own sizable Afrobeats fan base. That fan base helped power sold out crowds for Wizkid and Davido at Afro Plus Fest. For those fans, this episode is a reminder of how fast an unexplained decision can dominate the conversation among people who track the genre’s biggest names as closely as any other corner of pop music. Until Asake’s team explains what happened, expect the theories to keep circulating, much like the online chatter that followed Angélique Kidjo’s Walk of Fame moment, minus the mystery.