Cantilever, “the MUBI of music streaming”, now live on iOS

07 November 2025 - Press release

Cantilever, the highly-curated antidote to music streaming’s content deluge, has launched for iPhone users in the UK. A brand new music streaming app, Cantilever operates on a completely different model to market leaders Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube, offering subscribers 10 hand-picked albums per month for £4.99. 

Dubbed "the MUBI of music streaming," Cantilever has secured partnerships with leading independent labels including Ninja Tune, Domino Records, Warp Records and Beggars Group (XL, 4AD, Young, Matador, Rough Trade). The platform combines carefully curated albums with long-form journalism and artist interviews, providing rich context to immerse the listener in the imaginary world of the artist as they listen to their album. Each album is available for one month only. 

Unlike Spotify's pro-rata payment model, Cantilever uses a user-centric system: if a subscriber listens to just one artist in a given month, that artist receives their entire £4.99 subscription fee. On Spotify, by contrast, the royalty pool is divided between 100 million+ tracks based on total platform streams, meaning artists receive payment for streams they never received from that individual listener. 

"Cantilever will be about celebrating curation, not algorithmic overload” says Aaron Skates, the 29-year-old founder, who has secured partnerships with some of the UK's top indie labels. “By limiting the pool of artists and constantly rotating content, we can provide significant value to our partners at far lower subscriber scales. It’s about creating a different approach to music streaming from the ground up; putting music in the foreground.” 

Assuming equal consumption across content, if Cantilever achieves just 10K subscribers, each album will be earning the equivalent of over 1 million Spotify streams.