About
Rights ops should be a tool, not a Tuesday morning.
DSP Watch is the rights-ops inbox for catalog owners who are tired of finding their own releases on someone else's profile. We surface duplicates across Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube, file court-ready takedowns through five live adapters and keep a hash-chained audit log of every action — so when the re-upload comes back, you already have the paper trail.
Why we exist
Why does DSP Watch exist?
Indie labels and distributors lose revenue every week to duplicates, stem-rips and white-label re-uploads sitting on DSPs alongside the original release. The handling ritual hasn't changed in a decade: someone on the rights team searches Spotify, screenshots the offender, drops the link in a spreadsheet, drafts a takedown email and waits. The same person does it again next Tuesday.
The status quo isn't a missing tool — it's a missing standard. There's no shared way to file a takedown that survives a re-upload counter- notice. There's no shared way to prove the takedown was filed in good faith. So the work gets done manually, the evidence gets lost in an inbox and the same duplicate gets re-uploaded under a new UPC three weeks later.
DSP Watch is the standard. One inbox for findings. One signed §512(c)(3) bundle per action. One hash-chained audit log that proves who signed what, when, and from which MFA-fresh session. The point is not to file faster — the point is that when the offender comes back, the evidence is already on the chain.
- 5 live takedown adapters
- 256-bit SHA-256 hash-chained audit log
- 5 min MFA freshness window for signer attestation
- 1 founder, AU-based, on the keyboard
Principles
What do we believe?
Four principles shape every decision — what to build, what to refuse to build and what to refactor when the answer changes.
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Rights ops should be a tool, not a Tuesday morning
Catalog teams shouldn't burn a morning every week stitching DSP search results into a spreadsheet. The work is real, the dignity of doing it manually is not. We build the tool so the team can spend Tuesday on the catalog.
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Evidence first, takedown second
A takedown that cannot be defended is worse than no takedown. Every action DSP Watch files is bound to a SHA-256-addressed evidence PDF, a signer attestation and a hash-chained audit row. The point is not speed; the point is being able to prove the speed was warranted.
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Adapters over scrapers
We ship one adapter per DSP route — five live today: DMCA generic, Spotify form, Apple form, YouTube Content ID, distributor forward. Adapters fail loudly, version explicitly and leave a paper trail. Scrapers fail silently and leave nothing.
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Small surface, deep correctness
DSP Watch is one workflow done end-to-end: find duplicates, file takedowns, prove the action. We add a feature when correctness demands it, not when a sales call asks for it.
Founder
Who's building this?
Navid Rastegani
Founder · Australia
Navid is the founder and currently the only person writing code. Before DSP Watch he spent two years inside an indie distributor watching catalog teams fight duplicates with screenshots and spreadsheets. He started DSP Watch in early 2026 because nobody else was going to.
DSP Watch is built in Australia, deployed at the Cloudflare edge, and runs on a deliberately small stack: Postgres with row-level security, Cloudflare Workers and R2, Fly.io for evidence rendering. The team is small on purpose — the surface area is small on purpose.
You can reach Navid at hello@dspwatch.com. No team photo on this page — when there is a team, there will be photos.
How we got here
The short version of the timeline.
- 2024-2025
Navid spends two years inside an indie distributor watching the same five-step duplicate-handling ritual eat the same Tuesday morning, every week, across every label. The ritual is: DSP search, copy-paste into sheet, screenshot, email distributor, hope. Nobody likes it. Nobody has a tool for it.
- Early 2026
DSP Watch begins as a single-tenant rights-ops inbox for one design-partner label. The first build does one thing — surface duplicates with a confidence score — and exposes the part that actually hurts: filing the takedown and keeping the evidence.
- Q1-Q2 2026
M1 through M5 ship. Tenant isolation via Postgres row-level security, SHA-256 hash-chained audit log, MFA-fresh signer attestation, content-addressable evidence PDFs and five live takedown adapters. Stripe billing goes live in Q2 2026.
- Q3 2026
Closed beta opens for 5 design-partner labels and distributors. Marketing site at the apex, product at app.dspwatch.com. This is the page you're reading now.
What we're building toward
Where does DSP Watch go next?
The next milestone is closing the loop on re-uploads. A takedown that gets re-listed under a new UPC three weeks later is not really a takedown — it's a tax. We're building the surface that watches for the same fingerprint to come back, automatically files the follow-up against the new listing and reuses the original evidence bundle so the audit chain stays one continuous record.
After that: deeper distributor integrations so the takedown doesn't need a human in the middle for low-risk findings, and a public transparency report so customers can show their boards what the rights-ops function actually delivered last quarter.
We're not building a marketplace. We're not building generative anything. We're building one workflow, done end-to-end, in a way that holds up when somebody asks who signed the takedown and when.
Want to be one of the first five labels on it?
Closed beta opens Q3 2026 for 5 design-partner labels and distributors. Join the waitlist or email the founder directly.