Cantilever

Mainstream streaming pays artists fractions of a cent and buries them in algorithmic queues. Cantilever was built to do the opposite: a curated service featuring a small selection of exceptional albums, with fairer artist payments and stories that give each release real context. Avinto built everything, including the iOS app, Android app, web, and custom backend, working as one team with Cantilever’s design.

About Cantilever

Cantilever is a curated music streaming service for independent music, featuring a hand-picked selection of exceptional albums paired with contextual stories and artist reflections. It was built to give independent artists fairer revenue and listeners a more meaningful way to discover music.

Location

London, UK

Company Size

Startup

Industry

Music Streaming

The Challenge

Artists earn almost nothing, and listeners discover almost nothing

Mainstream streaming platforms pay artists very little, while their recommendation algorithms prioritize volume and engagement over genuine discovery. Independent artists with exceptional work have no meaningful home they get buried next to mass-market content with no context, no story, and no fair revenue share.

Building an alternative meant solving real infrastructure problems: secure streaming with entitlement checks, subscription billing, app store compliance, and a content management system all from scratch, all at once, under a compressed delivery window.

Artists earn almost nothing, and listeners discover almost nothing

The Solution

A full platform: curated, fair, and built to hold up under real streaming load

Avinto built the complete Cantilever platform, including native iOS and Android apps, a web client, a custom Django backend with a full media delivery pipeline, subscription management via Stripe, and a lightweight CMS for editorial curation. Product design came from Cantilever, and Avinto built everything underneath it while working as one team throughout.

Core Functionality

Built around how serious music listeners actually want to listen

Album-centric browsing

Users explore a curated catalog of full albums rather than individual tracks. They experience the whole work, not just what the algorithm surfaces.

Track playback

High-quality streaming with background audio support, media-session integration, and persistent play state across sessions.

Artist reflections & editorial

Accompanying narratives and artist comments enrich each release, giving listeners context, not just audio.

Secure authentication

Subscription/payment handling

Stripe/in-app purchases, recurring billing, trial management, and webhooks fully managed.

Content delivery

Signed, time-limited URLs are sent to audio assets, ensuring only entitled users can play tracks.

Eight backend components built from scratch to hold up under real streaming load

Every layer of the Cantilever backend was custom-built. There was no off-the-shelf streaming backend that could handle curated entitlements, fair-revenue attribution, and editorial content management in one system. Avinto built the API, authentication, media delivery, subscription pipeline, background task system, analytics, catalog, and deployment infrastructure from scratch, then wired them together into a platform that runs continuously without downtime.

API Layer

Django REST API

Authentication, catalog, playback rights, subscriptions, and editorial content are all hosted in one API.

Authentication

JWT-based sessions, role/permission management, and social/email logins.

Media Delivery

Azure Blob + signed URLs

Time-limited, playback-token entitlement checks ensure only paying users can play tracks.

Subscription

Stripe via webhooks

Celery handles billing cycles, trials, and notifications. No manual intervention needed.

Background Tasks

Celery + Redis

Uploads, newsletters, indexing, analytics, and caching are all processed asynchronously.

Catalog

PostgreSQL + Elasticsearch

PostgreSQL for content, Elasticsearch for fast search, and a lightweight CMS for curation.

Deployment

Docker + Kubernetes

Autoscaling, health checks, and horizontal scaling for stable continuous playback.

What Made This Harder Than a Standard Streaming App

Entitlement-gated media delivery
Streaming audio to paying subscribers only with signed, time-limited URLs that expire after each session required careful coordination between the auth system, the media delivery layer, and the playback client on every platform.
App Store submission hurdles
Multiple rounds of compliance fixes, metadata adjustments, and in-app flow refinements were required to pass Apple App Review. This unpredictable process demanded flexibility and fast iteration.
Everything at once, under a tight window

What our client say

“Avinto delivered something rare: a team that took genuine ownership of the product from day one. They navigated the complexity of multi-platform streaming, such as entitlement checks, subscription billing, and App Store compliance, and shipped everything within a tight window without cutting corners on quality.”

Aaron Skates

Founder

Pitch Quest
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