Nicholas Sonuga and Min Hamzianpour met while “spending endless hours in dingy, expensive basement studios.” In their capacity as nearby music producers, they would gripe about the fact that the majority of the few studio alternatives were “barely soundproof units in basements in the middle of nowhere,” according to Hamzianpour.
No sense of community, no room for change, and exorbitant set prices. We paid for a facility that we barely occupied. They opted to open their own studio after being unable to find one that was adaptable and “where we felt like part of a valued community of talented, ambitious creators.”
That is Qube, a private club for artists including podcasters and musicians. They currently operate two locations, with 32,000 square feet of studio space each, in Acton and Canary Wharf. Anthony Joshua, Stormzy, M Huncho, and Mabel are just a few of its 500 members who can reserve studio time for as little as an hour or as long as three years.
Sonuga claims he “struggled with traditional education, I never engaged with the subjects at school,” and he worked as a part-time promoter for ten years before starting a degree in music technology at the University of West London. The two pursued divergent paths to Qube. While this was going on, Hamzianpour spent several years working in wealth management at Morgan Stanley before “shocking my parents” and leaving to pursue a career in music as A-Minor, with track played on radio 1.
In 2016, they began interacting as studio neighbors. The year after they made their initial decision to open their own space, they quickly located a sizable apartment in a co-living complex that included a concrete cube in the middle. “Therefore, Qube,” explains Hamzianpour, 34. “We worked all night to put a pitchdeck together.”
The two eventually paid a £70,000 deposit on a 15-year lease for another empty warehouse in Acton after that site fell through. The timer to acquire money and furnish the place immediately began because it involved both of us risking our life savings.
Before they were able to secure £2 million from 20 angel investors, including Bernard Kantor, co-founder of Investec, and Nikhil Shah, co-founder of streaming platform MixCloud, it took thousands of cold emails and hundreds of coffee meetings, says Hamzianpour.
Construction work went as planned until asbestos in the roof was found two months before the launch. “Every contractor had to go. In the end, the studios were finished so close to launch that we could only evaluate the studios’ acoustic integrity the night before launching, Hamzianpour acknowledges.”Nick and I tested each studio individually that night, playing music and praying that it wasn’t audible in the adjacent room. Going through 40 studios one at a time gave me the feeling of playing Russian roulette. But they persisted, and in March 2020, the pair opened their doors. Hamzianpour remarks, “Can you imagine it – right in the thick of Covid’s beginning. Qube, however, was able to maintain studios available during lockdown for socially distant, individual purposes because it had already sold 70 longer-term studio leases, and as a result, “incredibly, we turned profitable in our first six months.”
Producers and engineers who worked with artists like Simply Red, Sam Smith, Kylie Minogue, and Ellie Goulding are now included in the group. Depending on the studio time, the rental price ranges from £75 to £2000. The studios are unmanned at night; “we’ve had a few parties kick off, but not major: a membership committee listens to everyone’s music or podcasts prior we allow anyone, and we make sure everybody will fit with the community.”
The two dismiss worries that a bigger competitor may steal their idea: “Our competitive moat is that creators are dependent on products that feel too corporate.” They raised an additional £500,000 in 2020 and £2 million in 2021.
The Canary Wharf location, which has studios just for YouTubers and TikTokers, opened its doors in February. The couple expects revenue to reach £1.6 million this year and plans to add six more UK locations and 12 abroad by 2028. In five years, if you’re an online content producer in any creative capital, Qube is where you go to generate high-quality material, according to Qube’s mission statement.