_whm1

> They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody.

There are services that can detect most commercial VPN services, e.g. https://focsec.com

Focsec* provides VPN, Proxy and bot detection via an API for such use cases (trial abuse).

* https://focsec.com/

There are so called "residential proxies" that use a IP from some normal consumer ISP connection, not some datacenter IP. However there are services that can detect such residentials too, e.g. https://focsec.com/

Selfhosted alternative: https://github.com/kennell/curldrop

This is easy to block since all IPs of these cloud machines will belong to the same ASN.

Advanced scrapers mostly use residential IPs nowadays, but there are some services to detect those too, e.g. https://focsec.com/

Another self-hosted script (Python) that aims for easy integration with curl

https://github.com/kennell/curldrop

When i moved to the US i had no idea about the amount of zonening laws, construction regulations and building codes. Coming from europe i naively thought that since the US is the "land of the free" people could basically build whatever they want on the piece of dirt they owned. Reality is, the amoung of regulation is far more than i have encountered in my hometown in Poland.

I don't think this is a good long term investment.

Disclaimer: I worked for a Spotify competitor in the past, so i have a pretty solid understanding of how the business works.

I think it is a bad investment for one simple reason: Spotify purchases its main product (music) from a oligopoly. I'd estimate that 95%+ of the tracks streamed (by total playtime) are from one of the 3 major music labels: Universal, Sony or Warner. That includes sublabels that in some cases may have a seperate deal with Spotify, but at the end of the day are still part of the big 3. Imagine you are a Sony executive, walking by a news stand and the Wall Street Journal Headline is "Spotify Q2 earnings 30% up". What are you gonna do? You will squeeze them, make them pay, just enough that they survive. And Spotify has zero negotiation power here. If Sptify fails to have a deal with any 1 of these 3 labels, they become useless overnight. People will switch to Apple Music, Amazon PrimeMusic, Tidal or any other service quickly. It doesn't matter if Spotifys app is slighty better than the competitors software if they lack 1/3 of the music.