Uganda's Concerts Are Boring — Prima Kardashi, And That's Costing Artists a Fortune
Uganda's Concerts Are Boring — And That's Costing Artists a Fortune
By WigWag Africa | Entertainment & Business | August 4, 2026
Prima Kadarshi did not start a debate. She ended one that the Ugandan entertainment industry had been quietly having with itself for years.
"Your concerts are boring. We can't see the same basic things every time," the socialite and cultural commentator said during a TikTok Live session that quickly spread across every group chat in Kampala. "I woke up one day and decided I won't go back to Ugandan events. I don't have FOMO because I can't be paying my money for rubbish."
The comments landed hard, not because they were cruel, but because they were accurate. And because the person saying them is exactly the kind of audience member the Ugandan music industry cannot afford to lose: an influencer with a following, disposable income, and the social authority to move a room.
She framed her criticism as friendship. "They are my friends, so if I can't tell them, who will? It seems people fear telling them the truth." This was not a random attack. It was a diagnosis from someone embedded in the industry, someone who has attended enough Ugandan concerts to recognise the pattern: same stage setup, same running order, same three-hour wait before the main act, same abrupt ending just when the energy peaks.
What Prima said on TikTok, the numbers have been saying in balance sheets for years. Uganda's live music economy is underperforming. And the people paying the price are the artists.
WigWag Insight
Across Africa, entertainment is increasingly behaving like technology. Artists are no longer competing only through music. They are competing through customer experience, premium positioning, data, and recurring revenue. The concert itself is becoming one product inside a much larger entertainment ecosystem. Ugandan artists who fail to understand this shift are not just losing ticket sales; they are losing relevance.
The Year Uganda Got It Right
To understand how far the scene has fallen, you have to go back to March 2014. Lugogo Cricket Oval, Kampala. Jose Chameleone. "Tubonge Live."
Chameleone broke the record for the largest audience any East African performer had ever drawn, pulling an estimated 40,000 fans to Lugogo in a single night. Fans streamed in from 7pm, braving a heavy evening drizzle that would have emptied most venues. They stayed anyway. Dressed like a biblical Roman warrior, Chameleone performed a setlist that moved through his entire catalogue, Luganda, Swahili, English, rumba, reggae, dancehall, with live band arrangements, guest appearances, and theatrical staging.
That concert was not just a record-setter. It was a business case. Forty thousand people at Lugogo generated revenue that placed it among the highest-grossing entertainment events in East African history. Chameleone had invested in production, lighting, sound, costuming, rehearsal, and narrative structure. The audience could feel the difference between a man who had prepared a show and a man who had merely booked a stage.
That same year, Chameleone staged "One Man, One Million" at Victoria Hall, charging every attendee one million Ugandan shillings, roughly $270 at the time. It sold out. The two concerts together made 2014 the most commercially significant year in Ugandan live music.
That was twelve years ago.
What Changed
The Ugandan concert market did not collapse dramatically. It declined gradually, incrementally, until someone like Prima Kadarshi said it plainly and everyone nodded.
The production investment gap widened. International artists arrive with production riders refined over hundreds of shows. Ugandan artists, producing independently or through small promoters, largely cannot match that standard. The gap is visible from the first song.
The ticket pricing psychology broke. An increasing number of artists began throwing "empisa" concerts, shows where tickets are priced so cheaply that the venue fills without generating meaningful revenue. A full venue at 20,000 shillings per head generates a fraction of what a half-full venue at 80,000 shillings per head generates, and it trains audiences to expect low prices.
The same artists are doing the same shows. The same headliners perform multiple times per year with setlists that have not meaningfully changed. There is no concept development, no thematic arc, no visual storytelling. The concert experience has been reduced to a live version of a playlist.
The post-COVID reset never fully happened. The brief excitement after the pandemic has normalised. What remains is a market where the experience delivered does not reliably justify the price charged.
The Business Case
Here is what Ugandan artists are leaving on the table.
A concert with 5,000 attendees at 30,000 UGX generates 150 million UGX. A concert with 3,000 attendees at 80,000 UGX generates 240 million UGX with 40 percent fewer people to manage, better audience demographics for sponsors, and a premium atmosphere that justifies future pricing.
The math favours quality over volume. But it requires upfront investment in production and a willingness to price tickets at a level that reflects that investment.
The artists who have built genuine wealth in Uganda's music industry, Bobi Wine, Eddy Kenzo, Jose Chameleone, have done so not through concert revenue alone but through real estate, agribusiness, studio ownership, and brand partnerships. They are rich despite the concert business model, not because of it. The concert, for most Ugandan musicians, is not a profit centre. It is a marketing event, an expensive way to remind people they exist.
This is the hidden tragedy in Prima's criticism. She is describing a business failure that is keeping Uganda's most talented artists from building financial security.
What Investors Are Seeing
The Ugandan entertainment industry has significant commercial appeal. But serious investors are walking away.
There is no reliable data. Ugandan promoters operate without digital records, making it impossible to model returns or set benchmarks.
The intellectual property ecosystem is underdeveloped. A Ugandan artist's catalogue generates almost no passive income. UPRS, the collecting society, remains underfunded and unable to enforce collection at scale.
The concert production infrastructure is a rental economy. Every element is rented for each event. There is no permanent venue in Kampala designed specifically for live music.
What Prima experienced as boredom is what an investor experiences as risk.
The Template Already Exists
Other African markets have solved these problems.
Nigeria's concert industry has been transformed by artists who approach their shows as premium experiences. Burna Boy's Earth Gain Festival generates revenue beyond ticket sales, from merchandise, streaming, brand partnerships, and international licensing. Davido and Wizkid regularly sell out arenas internationally because their production quality matches their music.
Kenya has developed recurring event brands. The Blankets and Wine model reframed what a live music experience could be.
In Rwanda, the government has positioned live events as tourism infrastructure, building facilities and using events as magnets for visitors.
Uganda has everything those markets started with: talent, cultural richness, a capital city with growing purchasing power, and an audience hungry for memorable experiences. What it lacks is the willingness to treat live entertainment as an industry worth building.
What Needs to Change
Artists need to produce fewer, better concerts. One exceptional show per year, priced correctly, promoted professionally, and produced to a standard that surprises, will generate more revenue, more goodwill, and more career value than six forgettable ones. Scarcity is a pricing tool.
Promoters need to invest in the experience before the event. Queuing, entry logistics, food, merchandise, visual design, all of it shapes how the audience feels. A concert where the experience is excellent from arrival is a concert people talk about.
A permanent live music venue needs to exist in Kampala. Not a cricket oval. Not a hotel grounds. A purpose-built space with fixed acoustic infrastructure, defined capacity tiers, and a recurring programming calendar.
The government needs to treat live entertainment as export infrastructure. An internationally significant concert generates hotel nights, restaurant covers, transport spend, and media coverage that no billboard can replicate.
The Verdict Prima Already Delivered
Prima Kadarshi is not an industry analyst. She is an audience member with a TikTok account and the courage to say what most of the paying public thinks.
What she described, the sameness, the predictability, the feeling of paying for an experience that does not justify the price, is a product problem. And product problems are fixable.
Uganda has never lacked musical talent. Jose Chameleone proved in March 2014 that Ugandan artists can fill forty thousand people into a venue and make every one of them glad they came. The ingredients were professional: investment in production, staging, narrative, and the audience's time and money.
The artists who have built lasting wealth have treated their careers as businesses. The ones who remain celebrated but financially precarious have treated their careers as art projects, valuable but structurally unable to generate the compound returns that a business can produce.
The concert industry is where those two trajectories diverge most visibly. Prima Kadarshi has described the fork in the road more clearly than any industry report has managed.
The question is whether anyone is listening.
WigWag Africa covers Entertainment, Business, Culture, and Finance across Uganda and the African continent. Follow us at @wigwagafrica and subscribe at wigwagafrica.com.
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