A Pass has a message for fellow Ugandan musicians planning concerts: know your audience before choosing your venue.
Speaking during a TikTok Live, the singer advised artists to carefully consider the size and strength of their fanbases before booking shows, arguing that choosing a venue simply because it is prestigious can backfire.
A Pass said artists need to understand where their audience is strongest and plan concerts around that reality rather than chasing a particular venue.
“You organise a show somewhere it’s not meant to be and then you start crying before you even perform. You can go to your local stall and you can’t make people gather and you’re asking for Lugogo?” he said.
His point was that an artist’s ability to attract a crowd should come before the desire to perform at one of Uganda’s biggest or most recognizable concert venues.
A Pass also made a distinction between his own reach and that of other musicians.
He said he is confident about staging shows at major locations such as Kololo Airstrip and Lugogo Cricket Oval, while emphasizing that artists have different levels of audience reach.
“You reach the show and start cursing people but in actual sense you’re the problem when you shouldn’t have held the show at that venue. I can do places like Kololo and Lugogo,” A Pass said.
The comments come as Uganda’s music industry continues to place significant attention on concert attendance.
Major venues can offer artists greater visibility and prestige, but they also come with the pressure of attracting enough people to fill the space.
For A Pass, the solution is not complicated: artists should build their shows around the audiences they actually have rather than the venues they want to be associated with.
His comments also highlight one of the biggest challenges in Uganda’s live music business — translating an artist’s popularity, streaming numbers or social media presence into people physically buying tickets and showing up.
The singer’s advice is therefore less about avoiding big venues and more about knowing when an artist is ready for one.
In a concert business where the crowd often speaks louder than the hype, A Pass believes the venue should match the fanbase — not the other way around.