🔵 "Build a sustainable business and get value over to musicians and journalists"

A chat with Aaron Skates, founder of Cantilever

Cantilever was a service that caught my attention a couple of months ago, for a couple of reasons. First, it was so reductive and simple in its aim, that it amounted to a huge breath of fresh air. As platforms try to shoehorn more and more ‘stuff’ into their offerings, it is refreshing to see a service that just Does One Thing, and does it rather well.

Secondly, Cantilever was moving forward without the involvement of the majors, a move I’d consider quite transgressive these days. I have seen a lot of services come and go, and one might go as far as to argue that the reason they did not survive for long was that they had needed to pay huge advances to the major labels, thereby ensuring they were instantly saddled with unmanageable debt. Ergo, seeing a service press on without that deal in place amounts to a bold move. Plus, as a man firmly supporting artists and independence, I loved seeing various indie labels stepping up to sign on and support this; it’s great to see something positive come forward in this way.

Ultimately, we are at a point where there is a large amount of frustration around the current status quo, especially for smaller or more indie-focused artists. To that end, Cantilever represents a new approach to offering music, and for that I felt it warranted a closer look and, ultimately, a chat with Aaron Skates, the company’s founder.

As this was a freewheeling chat, I’ve elected to break it up into two parts. Part one is below, and part two will follow in 48hrs time. The service is UK only for now, but if you’re in the UK you can sign up here (and I recommend you do!).

Enjoy!

D.

🎶 Listening to “AK Cuts, Vol.1” by Anish Kumar. Shouts to Oli who thought I might enjoy this - he was absolutely right. This is some of the most obnoxiously funky dancefloor house I’ve heard in years. Sometimes we can think too hard about music; now and then it’s just about playing this stuff loud as hell and dancing like a person possessed. Don’t let track one fool you either; that’s just a teaser. My word it gets hefty after that!

📖 Reading “The EQ and Compression Formula” by Nathan Nyquist (quite the pseudonym there). I’m in the process of mixing down a hefty dub album I’ve made with my buddy Pete Sasqwax, and this book proved a fine, simple reference tome for some guidance on getting the most from the mix. YouTube videos abound on all things music production, but I’m actually finding books a better reference point these days.

🤖 Playing with Vision 4X, a plugin designed by Excite Audio and the wizards in Noisia, who are certainly representing some of the most ridiculously clinical, brilliant mixing in music at the moment. Vision 4X is basically a tool to better analyse your mix and see exactly what is going on. It is formidably powerful, but might also be the most complicated plugin I’ve ever used in terms of wrapping my head around it. I shall persevere though as the insights it delivers are quite incredible.

A quick word about music and other bits: if you have music you think I might enjoy, then by all means feel free to email me (and if you need my email, reply here and I’ll send it to you). I’m definitely up for recommendations from readers, much as with that AK Cuts release above. Likewise anything else you might think I’d enjoy checking out. I can’t guarantee replies to everyone, but certainly enjoy getting great recommendations and am happy to support great things I come across. So if you feel so inclined, by all means fire away!

Right - let’s move on to the interview…

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So, let’s start at the basics Aaron. What is Cantilever? I’m conscious that it’s a UK-only service, but I have no doubt people may have read about it that are not in the UK. Could you therefore give a crisp summary of what it is?

Yeah, absolutely. Cantilever is a curated music streaming platform that features only a limited number of albums at any given time. We’re starting with 10, and we’re going to get to 30 as an absolute max for now. The albums last for one month each, so it’s a rotating feed of great albums. Each album is delivered in great context. So a music journalist will write up: “Who is the artist? Why have they made this? What’s interesting about it? What kind of musical or cultural background is the artist coming from?” Or it will be an interview with the artist themselves. We’re trying to bundle together music journalism and a streaming service that pays artists on a user-centric basis.

On that: when I first tried Cantilever when it was in beta, one of my thoughts was, “this is great, but could I not achieve the same thing with like a substack and embedded players?” What do you say to that?

You could, but you have to ask yourself where these embedded players are coming from. Let’s say I’m a journalist and I write a Substack and I monetize it. I recommend an album and I have an embedded player for that album that’s coming from Bandcamp. The artist doesn’t make any money because Bandcamp has a limited preview model, where their “streaming” is actually more or less an advert for a digital download or a physical purchase. Cantilever is providing 70% of all of its user revenue to right holders from the streams themselves.

If you did an embedded Spotify player on Substack, that’s also fine, but once again the streaming payouts are extremely low. So the actual revenue you’re driving into music and in our case, purely independent music, is little to nonexistent. What we’re trying to enable is that you stream there and then, and your money goes to the artist, as well as keeping the platform running.

Are you able to elaborate on the financial side of this, or even better, give some examples? Only I think that’s the that’s the point of difference that really interests me. If I’m the artist, I’ve got a new record and I get a lovely feature on Cantilever and I’m on there for a month, what might that potentially look like for me?

All user revenue is put into one pool and then it’s divided up on this pro-rata model. It’s about percentage consumption of the platform. Therefore, if a massive global superstar gets 1% of all streams, they get 1% of that user revenue pool. And in effect, they get 1% of your individual subscription fee, even if you didn’t personally listen to them.

The user-centric system is that you only ever pay for the music that you actually listen to. If in a given month on Cantilever but you only listened to one song, then your per-stream rate effectively becomes your entire subscription fee, minus the platform cut, because all of your money would go to that one song.

In terms of how much you can expect to earn as an artist, if we get to 10,000 subscribers, we’ll be paying each one of the ten albums, if it was equal consumption, around three thousand pounds, which is roughly the equivalent of about a million Spotify streams.

We’re actively attempting to pass value over to everything on the platform, rather than trying to recreate the winner-takes-all model, because it’s dependent on what our users are actively streaming, rather than having this big dilution that happens with the largest artists. All streaming models are necessarily imperfect, but I think this is the fairest way of remunerating the works that are on the platform.

One thing I noticed about Cantilever is the fact that it’s launched without the involvement of the majors. I’ve been around a long time, I’ve seen a lot of music services come and go, and it was always a caveat that if you don’t have the majors on board, your startup was simply not going to work. Can you talk to me a bit about the decision to go ahead with select indies on board ?

My professional career so far has been in independent music - at independent record labels and distribution companies.

We have to remember that independent music has its own fundamental identity that is different to what the major labels do. I think that independent record labels are able to take very bold, creative risks. So what we’re trying to platform on Cantilever are albums that are part of that kind of creative risk-taking. There will frequently be records on there that a major label would never touch. That’s what indie labels have always represented to me. Growing up, I was a big listener to independent record labels, and I wanted to know about them. I wanted to understand the culture behind them, where they were coming from, and what the purpose was.

One thing that is true is if you were to start a full catalog streaming service and you didn’t sign a deal with the majors, you can’t have Stevie Wonder and you can’t have Bob Dylan and you can’t have X, Y, Z artists. That’s a big problem for those services because so much of what people engage with on streaming - increasingly so - is catalogue music. There was a tipping point where catalogue music far eclipses the consumption of new music on major streaming platforms.

We’re trying to redress that balance a little bit. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but if you look at Cantilever, the majority of the releases that we are featuring are new releases or in the case of, for example, Stereolab, there’s a record on Cantilever from 2004, but the band are currently on tour. So it’s kind of actively participating with music culture that is existing as opposed to catalogue listening for maybe less active artists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I don’t want to put that forward as an idea. It’s just that there’s something about directly engaging with what’s coming out of independent record labels, taking these creative risks and trying to give another platform to showcase that.

The phrase “independent labels” has come up quite a lot in this chat. Obviously we’re now in a wider world of artists self-releasing and artist services deals etc, such that even the term ‘indie’ is becoming problematic. Universal are trying to own it, all of which I consider a bit disingenuous. Could Cantilever work with self-releasing artists who are not on indie labels such as XL, Warp, Ninja Tune et al?

Yes. The people who are contributing to Cantilever are writers who have been music journalists for a while and people who have written for places like The Quietus, Loud and Quiet, Bandcamp and Pitchfork. So we ask them, “Would you be interested in writing about any of these releases, or would you as an individual like to suggest a release to write about?”. So there will be some independent artists who are coming directly from journalists and they might not be signed to any label, or may be self-releasing.

The journalism aspect of Cantilever is almost 50% of it to me, because I think if you just had the music on there and just had 10 albums, it would look like a quite an odd streaming service. I have a Substack that I’ve completely neglected called Missed Listens and the idea was not a million miles from Cantilever, in that it was essentially writing about records that I thought were missed classics. So I would write about it, and at the top would be an embedded player, which would say “click to listen along as you read”.

A lot of people, when they were talking to me about it, were saying “I don’t feel we talk about music enough anymore”, which I definitely feel is the case. We don’t contextualize it; it’s all just, “here’s some stuff to listen to”. The journalism plays a key part of this, I feel. To that end though, are the writers being paid what they would term as a respectable rate?

Absolutely. So multiple things to pick up on there, I think. Firstly, Missed Listens is great; I have read it and it’s interesting that you use the word ‘context’ as this is really what we are trying to achieve at Cantilever. I think that music journalism in its most traditional form has neglected to catch up with the streaming era, where we’re still very much in the world of reviews. I feel that the review is an outdated format for music journalism. It was there to help a consumer choice: “shall I buy this £10 CD or this £10 CD?” I read the review, it helps me make that choice. Nowadays, we don’t need instruction. We are able to just listen to any music we want, whenever we want, and so the review is not fit for purpose anymore, in my opinion.

On Cantilever, everything is about the context and the history and the culture and any sort of intriguing details that help enhance that listening experience, rather than saying “Is this good? Is this bad?”. There was this piece I read recently in the New Yorker that said music journalism isn’t critical enough. Personally I don’t see that as a huge issue. I think that it doesn’t need to necessarily be damning or critical to certain pieces of art. At least not on our platform, where what we’re doing is highlighting a piece of art and giving multiple threads to the reader, almost to enhance that or to say something intriguing about it, as opposed to giving a kind of authoritative stamp of, “is this good or is this bad?”

You can celebrate what makes a release brilliant without it turning into a sort of fawning review. There’s a difference.

Yeah I would agree. If you’re on Cantilever, check out the piece that Lottie Brazier wrote about Stereolab and you can see an example of the history of that record and the engagement with the recording process. It’s not an overly technical thing, but it really does help you get into the world of that album, why it was made, what the point of it was. That’s just a great example, so if you’re on a free trial take a look at that one.

But to your question: we pay at parity with the leading platforms of music journalism. We pay at parity with Pitchfork. And we have decided to pay that from day one.

For me, music journalism is very important, and if we’re making a commitment to pay artists on what we think is a fair basis, then we also should be making that commitment to the writers as well.

Amen to that. In terms of funding, you know, where are you at the moment with that?

I’m pleased to say that we’ve hit our fundraising target. We’re talking about a good, sustainable amount of funding that will allow us to get to the next phase. We’re not talking about crypto millions here, which I think is coming into a fair number of platforms that I see emerging. The funding we’ve received will allow us to make Cantilever sustainable, then start growing it.

You mentioned it’s UK only, but soon we hope to expand to the US and Europe, then elsewhere down the line. Currently what those places see will be fairly UK-centric, and so one way in which this could go forward is to start giving some kind of tailoring to the material that you see in each place. Think of a platform like NTS, which has Channel 1, Channel 2. One might be in London, two might be elsewhere. We’d like to do something like that where it could be tailored geographically to a place, but anybody would be able to see it. That’s the idea. So yeah, we don’t have any immediate plans to do any more fundraising. All the plans now are just: build a sustainable business and get value over to musicians and journalists.

… to be continued in part two, published on Wednesday.

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