There are industries that age well, and then there is the business of organising live music concerts in Uganda. According to veteran promoter and events organiser Abbey Musinguzi, widely known as Abtex, what was once a straightforward and profitable trade has morphed into something he describes bluntly as “total and pure gambling.” His words carry weight. This is not a newcomer venting frustration after a single bad show. This is a promoter who has watched the entire landscape shift beneath his feet over many years.
From Business to a Gamble: What Changed?
The contrast Abtex draws is striking. He points to an era when organising a major concert, even at scale, made clear financial sense. Promoters could confidently book large venues, bring in headline acts, and walk away with a profit that justified the effort and investment. He specifically references concerts featuring legendary Ugandan musician Fred Sebatta held at Nakivubo Stadium as textbook examples of shows that worked, both artistically and financially.
Those events filled seats, generated real revenue, and gave promoters the confidence to keep investing in live entertainment. The calculus was simple: put in money, put on a show, get money back and then some. That model, Abtex argues, has largely collapsed.
Today, a promoter can pour significant resources into a concert, covering everything from artist fees and venue hire to marketing, sound production, and security, only to find that ticket sales fall short, sponsors pull back, or attendance disappoints. The losses can be punishing. And unlike a poor harvest or a slow retail quarter, a failed concert offers almost no recovery mechanism. The night happens, the crowd either shows or it doesn’t, and the financial verdict is delivered in real time.
The Structural Problems Eating the Industry Alive
While Abtex frames it as gambling, the deeper issue is structural. Uganda’s live music economy faces a combination of pressures that have made the old model almost impossible to replicate. Artist fees have risen sharply as musicians, many of whom have built large social media followings, now command rates that reflect their perceived market value rather than the actual financial capacity of local promoters.
At the same time, the entertainment landscape has fragmented. Audiences today have more options than ever before, streaming platforms, social media content, smaller intimate shows, and free outdoor events all compete for the same leisure time and spending money. Convincing someone to pay a meaningful amount for a concert ticket, when they can watch their favourite artist perform on a phone screen for free, has become a genuinely hard sell.
Sponsorship, which once served as a critical buffer for promoters, has also become more competitive and harder to secure. Brands have grown more cautious, demanding data on attendance projections, audience demographics, and return on investment metrics that smaller promoters are not always equipped to provide. The informal handshake deals of previous decades have given way to a more transactional, often frustrating negotiation process.
The Ghost of Nakivubo: Why Nostalgia Is Not the Answer
It would be tempting to dismiss Abtex’s concerns as nostalgia, a veteran longing for simpler times. But that reading misses the point. He is not asking for the past to return. He is identifying a very real gap between what the industry once was and what it has become, and calling on stakeholders to reckon with that gap honestly.
The Fred Sebatta era at Nakivubo Stadium represents something specific: a time when Ugandan audiences were hungry for large-scale live events, when the infrastructure around concerts was less complicated, and when the economics of live music allowed promoters to build sustainable businesses. Whether that specific combination of factors can be recreated, or whether the industry needs an entirely new model, is the question that nobody in Uganda’s entertainment sector has fully answered yet.
What the Industry Needs to Hear
Abtex’s warning is ultimately a call for honesty. The concert business in Uganda needs promoters, musicians, government bodies, and sponsors to sit down and acknowledge that the old rules no longer apply. Ticket pricing strategies need rethinking. Artist fee expectations need to align more closely with what the local market can actually absorb. Venue operators need to think creatively about how they support promoters rather than simply collecting hire fees regardless of outcome.
There is also a broader conversation to be had about how live music is valued culturally in Uganda. If concerts are seen purely as commercial transactions rather than cultural investments, the industry will continue to struggle. Countries that have managed to build thriving live music economies have done so by treating concerts as part of a larger cultural ecosystem, one that includes artist development, audience education, and institutional support.
None of that happens overnight. And in the meantime, promoters like Abtex are left staring at spreadsheets that do not add up, wondering whether the next show will be the one that finally breaks even.
A Industry at a Crossroads
Uganda’s entertainment scene is not short of talent. The country produces musicians who connect with audiences across the continent. The appetite for live music has not disappeared. What has shifted is the infrastructure, the economics, and the expectations around how that music gets delivered to fans in a live setting.
Abtex’s candid assessment is a rare public acknowledgment of what many in the industry know privately but rarely say out loud. The business of putting on a concert in Uganda in 2026 is hard, risky, and increasingly thankless for the people who take on the financial burden of making it happen.
If the industry does not adapt, and quickly, Uganda risks losing the generation of promoters who have the experience and the relationships to make large-scale live music work. And when they go, they take institutional knowledge with them that cannot simply be downloaded or outsourced.
So here is the question worth sitting with: if Uganda’s most experienced concert promoters are walking away or warning others off the business, who exactly will be left to put on the shows that audiences still want to see?
