Quicket, the Cape Town self-service ticketing platform founded in 2011, has been owned by Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. since 2024. Ticketmaster, Live Nation’s ticketing arm, announced the acquisition on 24 July 2024. No price was disclosed then, and none has been disclosed since in any document checked for this piece. What Live Nation’s own filings add is the part the announcement left out: the transaction moved five separately incorporated companies in five African countries, and four of them do not carry the Quicket name at all.
Who owns Quicket now?#
Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., through Ticketmaster. The announcement of 24 July 2024, published on Live Nation Entertainment’s newsroom and on Ticketmaster’s business site, uses one verb: Ticketmaster is “acquiring Quicket”. It does not describe a licence, a distribution agreement, a joint venture or a minority investment. Those are four different legal relationships and none of them is what the parties said happened.
The corroboration is in Exhibit 21.1 to Live Nation’s Form 10-K, the annual list of subsidiaries every SEC registrant files. The exhibit filed on 21 February 2025, covering the year ended 31 December 2024, names five African entities that no earlier exhibit contains:
- Quicket Limited, Kenya
- Munyhub Online Ticketing Services Ltd, Nigeria
- Munyhub Online Ticketing Services (Pty) Ltd, South Africa
- Munyhub Online Ticketing Services – SMC Limited, Uganda
- Munyhub Online Ticketing Services Limited, Zambia
Munyhub Online Ticketing Services (Pty) Ltd is the registered company behind the Quicket brand in South Africa. The Google Play listing for the Quicket POS application names its publisher as MUNYHUB ONLINE TICKETING SERVICES (PTY) LTD, tying the trading name to the legal name in the filing.
One limit matters, and it is not a technicality. Exhibit 21.1 states legal name and jurisdiction of incorporation only, with no ownership percentage. It establishes that these companies are subsidiaries of Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. It does not establish that Live Nation holds one hundred per cent of any of them, and this piece does not claim so.
How large is Live Nation’s African corporate footprint?#
Every Live Nation subsidiaries exhibit back to the 2015 financial year was fetched from the SEC archive and parsed for entities incorporated in an African jurisdiction.
- 2015, filed 25 February 2016: zero.
- 2016, filed 23 February 2017: four, all South African. Unchanged through 2019.
- 2020, filed 1 March 2021: five, all South African. Unchanged through 2023.
- 2024, filed 21 February 2025: ten.
- 2025, filed 19 February 2026: eleven.
The jump from five to ten is the Quicket transaction. The eleventh, added in the most recent exhibit, is Quicket Holdco 1 Limited, incorporated in Kenya. No filing checked explains what that holding company is for.
Why does the acquisition not appear anywhere else in the annual report?#
Because it is not material enough to Live Nation to require it. The body of the Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2024 was fetched in full and searched. The words “Quicket”, “Munyhub”, “South Africa” and “Big Concerts” appear zero times in it. The entire African expansion is disclosed to shareholders as five lines in an exhibit.
That produces a genuine research trap. A full-text search of the SEC system for “Munyhub” returns exactly two documents, both Live Nation subsidiaries exhibits. Anyone searching Live Nation’s filings for “Quicket” in connection with South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda or Zambia will find nothing, because in those four jurisdictions the companies are filed under the Munyhub name. The brand and the corporate record do not match, and no filing reconciles them.
Was this a music rights deal?#
No. It is worth stating flatly, because ticketing deals are routinely written up as if they were catalogue deals. No document checked refers to the transfer of any master recording right, any publishing right, any share of a catalogue or any licence to exploit a sound recording. Nobody became the owner, administrator, distributor or licensee of anybody’s copyright.
What changed hands is the equity of a ticketing technology business and its operating companies in five countries, together with its customer relationships and payment integrations. In the taxonomy we use across verified African music deals, this is a sale of a company, not a sale of rights. The distinction decides who gets paid what, forever.
Who sold, and what did they receive?#
Quicket was founded in 2011 by James Tagg, James Hedley and Michael Kennedy. Cape Town venture capital manager Knife Capital exited its position in the transaction. Its own exits page records “Quicket, 2024, Acquired by Ticketmaster”. Keet van Zyl of Knife Capital describes the entry in contemporaneous trade reporting: Quicket joined the firm’s Grindstone accelerator in 2016, and in 2017 Knife invested through its Section 12J venture capital company, KNF Ventures.
Section 12J let a South African taxpayer deduct the full cost of shares in an approved venture capital company from taxable income, and allows no deduction for shares acquired after 30 June 2021. A South African exit into a New York listed acquirer was seeded through an incentive now closed to new money.
How did Live Nation get to South Africa in the first place?#
In stages, and earlier than most assume. Live Nation announced on 22 February 2016 that it had acquired a controlling interest in Big Concerts International Proprietary Limited, described in that release as South Africa’s leading concert promoter, founded by Attie van Wyk in 1989. The release discloses no consideration and no percentage. It does state that the two companies had worked together since mid-2009, when Big Concerts became the exclusive promotion partner for Live Nation tours in South Africa: a seven-year commercial relationship converted into ownership.
One wrinkle is worth flagging as a finding. The 24 July 2024 announcement states that Ticketmaster launched in the South African market in 2022. But Ticketmaster South Africa (Pty) Ltd first appears in the subsidiaries exhibit filed on 1 March 2021, covering the year ended 31 December 2020, and is absent from the exhibit filed on 27 February 2020. The entity therefore existed and was reportable at least one full financial year before the market launch the release describes. Incorporation and launch are different events, so neither document is necessarily wrong, but the two dates do not describe the same thing.
What this means for artists#
Three practical consequences, none of which touch your copyright.
First, your royalties are unaffected. Nobody acquired your masters and nobody acquired your publishing. If you were signed to a label or administered by a publisher on 23 July 2024, you were signed to exactly the same people on 25 July 2024. Ticketing revenue and recorded music revenue are separate pipes. This transaction moved one of them.
Second, in five countries the primary market for tickets to your own show is now a supplier owned by Live Nation, which also owns a promoter in the same market. It sits on the promotion side through Big Concerts and on the ticketing side through Ticketmaster South Africa and the Quicket and Munyhub entities. For an independent promoter or a self-releasing artist, the platform taking the booking fee and the company competing for the same touring act can now sit under one parent. That is a commercial fact, not an allegation.
Third: the terms of your ticketing arrangement are a negotiable commercial contract, and the other side of it just changed. If you or your promoter signed with Quicket as a founder-led Cape Town startup, the counterparty is now a subsidiary of an SEC registrant. Read your booking fee, your settlement terms and your data rights before your next on-sale.
What could not be established#
The price, the currency, the percentage of share capital acquired, whether the consideration was cash or included Live Nation stock, and whether any earn-out applies. The size of the stake Knife Capital held and the return it realised. Whether the transaction was notified to South Africa’s Competition Commission: no Commission decision, case number or press statement naming Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Quicket or Munyhub was located, and no trade report checked mentions a merger filing or conditions. South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission publishes no open API, so the registration numbers, shareholders and directors of Munyhub Online Ticketing Services (Pty) Ltd have not been checked against the South African register.
One further gap: Botswana is named as a Quicket market in the acquisition release, but no Botswana entity appears in either the 2024 or the 2025 subsidiaries exhibit, and no document checked explains that. The disclosure rule does let a registrant omit subsidiaries that are insignificant in the aggregate, but nothing says that is the reason here.
The full source list, including every filing fetched, sits on the deal record for the Ticketmaster acquisition of Quicket. For the same method applied to a recorded music transaction, see who owns Coleske. For why the numbers in African music deals are so rarely disclosed at all, see how much a music catalogue actually sells for.
Quick answers#
How much did Ticketmaster pay for Quicket?#
Not disclosed. Neither the 24 July 2024 announcement nor any Live Nation filing checked states a price, a currency or a percentage of share capital, and no party has disclosed one since.
What is Munyhub Online Ticketing Services?#
It is the registered company name behind the Quicket brand. Live Nation’s subsidiary list names Munyhub entities incorporated in South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia, plus a Quicket Limited in Kenya.
Does Live Nation own all of Quicket?#
Not established. Exhibit 21.1 to a Form 10-K names a subsidiary’s legal name and jurisdiction only, carrying no ownership percentage, so no document checked shows the size of Live Nation’s holding.
