In late July, Kip Moore made headlines when he posted an expletive-laden video message to the scalpers who had swiped up pre-sale tickets to his Fall 2019 acoustic tour. The video is no longer up, but make no mistake: It was Moore’s choice to take it down.

“No one forces me to do anything. That’s the first thing that you need to print!” the singer tells The Boot, forcefully but good-naturedly. “Everybody thinks I’m deleting it because I’m backing down or something. That’s not the point … I don’t need to let them live on the page. Sometimes when I feel like people have gotten my point, then I’ll take it down.”

Moore’s team used to “cringe,” he admits, at videos and statements like those. He gets it, he says – country artists largely play it safe when it comes to bold public statements about most social and political issues, and Kacey Musgraves’ onstage expletives recently made headlines – but, he adds, “I’ve never been afraid to speak my mind.”

“So when I delete something,” Moore continues, “it’s not because I was pressured to.”

And it certainly doesn’t mean that Moore’s going to let the scalpers win. “Scalping is legal, but is it right? Does [the fact that it’s legal] make it right?” he asks, explaining that, although we live in a free market society, he sees concert tickets as a different sort of commodity than, for example, a car or a pair of shoes.

“My concert’s only coming through [your area] once every two years. That’s a whole different bag. You can’t lump that in a same category,” Moore says. He grows more animated as he continues: “And this is a crowd that I’ve always tried to take care of … and tried to keep prices fair … and for you to come in and snatch my tickets up … and then completely change my pricing …

“Yeah, it’s legal, but it’s not right,” Moore concludes, “and I have a problem with people doing super unethical things like that.”

In addition to his acoustic concerts, Moore’s concert calendar includes a short string of Bud Light Dive Bar Tour stops, which began on Thursday (Aug. 15) and run through Friday (Aug. 23). Scalpers will have a much tougher time trying to get their hands on those tickets: Fans have to win their way into the intimate shows.

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