Every once in a while, I get emails from people asking me why my music is not on any of the streaming services. I have been meaning to put a statement up on my website regarding this question for the longest time, but have never gotten around to it. Today, I got an email from a young college student asking me the same question. I gave him a more detailed response than I expected, so I decided to put my response here for everyone to see. If you still have questions or objections to my reasons, please feel free to contact me using the contact link in the menu of this website. I am very open to your comments and suggestions.

Hello —-,
Thank you for your interest in my music and for all your kind words. I really appreciate all your positive comments.

Here are the reasons why my music is not on Spotify or iTunes. Because the value of music has dropped significantly over the years, I have decided to not make my music available on services like iTunes, Spotify or Pandora. these services benefit consumers like yourself much more than artists like me. Years ago, consumers had to purchase a whole album of music to get their favorite song. Then came the internet and services like the ones you mentioned. Let’s start with iTunes.

When iTunes came on the seen, they convinced consumers that they only needed to pay $1.29 for a song and whole albums, which use to be anywhere from $15 to even $20 began to be sold for no more than $10. To my knowledge, artists cannot put their music on iTunes directly. There are other services that put artists on iTunes and other digital platforms. Now we have a much smaller pie and that pie doesn’t go to the artist alone. It must be divided up between three entities, iTunes, the third party and the artist. This has made it very difficult for artists like myself with niche audiences to generate a sustainable income. I know several artists who have their music on iTune who have to work another job to support themselves. Because I am blind, I am not able to do this.

Spotify went a step farther and convinced consumers that they didn’t need to pay for the music at all. A small subscription fee would allow them to access a database of millions of songs. How much of that subscription fee do you thing goes to the artist? I read that it takes about a million plays on Spotify for an artist to make $90. For this reason, some artists have removed their music off of Spotify. Tayler Swift is one of them. Streaming services hurt artists the most, because it takes much longer to see a return on their investments. I’m sure you know that it costs lots of money to record and replicate CD’s which are still sold at live performances. Pandora is very similar to Spotify, so I will not say much about them. I believe you get my point. Incidentally, now Apple has launched Apple Play to compete with Spotify, so customers who have apple devices don’t really have any incentive to shop for music any more in the iTunes Store, since they can stream it for next to nothing.

Right now the only place my music can be purchased is at my website or at one of my performances. Your support would be greatly appreciated. If you purchase my music, all of the resources can be used to continue making the music you love.

I would like to start a streaming service of my own, one that would benefit artists much more than the current music streaming services do now. I want to return as much money to the artist as possible. I have even considered doing a fundraiser for a web based mobile platform for it. First, I would feature my music and then add other artists. When I launch the campaign to raise the funds to get the mobile platform created, I hope I will have your support. Right now, I am doing it very primitively. The music is delivered by email to subscribers once a month. To learn more about this new project, click this link.

Help me to continue making the music you love.

I have six CD’s in all and you can preview them by going to the store on my website. I also have my music in downloadable format. If you’re purchasing with a mobile device, you just need a utility on your phone to decompress zip folders. Once you open the zip folder and extract the music, you can add it to iTunes on your computer and then sink it back to the music library on your phone. You can even burn it to a CD if you wish. Here is the link to the store on my website.

Neville Peter’s Store
thank you for taking the time to read this and thanks again for your kind words. Hopefully, one day we will meet, if not here in this life then in the life to come where we both will enjoy the most wonderful music ever and most wonderful of all, it will be free.