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In a small section of Los Angeles’s Elysian Park, which spans the amount of land a single sprinkler head can water, a native plant experiment is underway that could change city parks for the better. It’s called Test Plot. Combining native plant species, volunteer gardeners, and a not insignificant amount of weeding, the experiment is trying to find a new way for urban parks to counter ecological degradation and improve climate resilience. The project launched in 2019 and is now underway in parks across California, and the approach is showing that with the right plants and the right amount of effort, parks can be brought back into sync with the natural tendencies of their environments. [Photo: Terremoto] An experiment to spur native, fire-resistant plant growth The idea came from the landscape architecture firm Terremoto, which formerly had an office just a few blocks from Elysian Park. “We saw that it was in need of some help,” says Jenny Jones, a landscape architect at Terremoto. Sections of the roughly 600-acre park were totally overrun by non-native species that crowd out more drought-tolerant, biodiverse, and fire-resilient species. The city’s overstretched parks department had been managing these issues through annual brush clearance, but the non-natives would always grow back, along with the risks they posed. “It clears for fire, but it also mows down every single native species in its path,” Jones says. “We wanted to just challenge the regime of maintenance that we were seeing in the park.” [Photo: Terremoto] In conjunction with a longstanding community group associated with the park, Terremoto approached the city about using the firm’s landscape architecture skills to try a different approach. They asked if they could run a small experiment, planting native plants and doing some active, volunteer-based gardening. The city agreed, with the stipulation that the project be temporary. [Photo: Terremoto] A way forward for more sustainable parks So in the fall of 2019 Terremoto hooked a hose to a water bib in the park, attached a sprinkler head, and started preparing a plot of land for a new kind of park planting. After a few rounds of watering and weeding, they planted dozens of one-gallon pots of native plants. Then, through regular maintenance and weeding sessions attended by a dedicated group of volunteers and enthusiasts, they simply helped the native plants thrive and stopped the non-native plants from moving back in. “We look to ecological restoration as a guide, but it’s not strict,” says Jones. “We lie somewhere between gardening and restoration.” Within three years the native plants fully established themselves, and no longer required watering, nor much weeding. This one plot, just 30 feet in diameter, proved that the park could be restored to a more sustainable and ecologically balanced state. [Photo: Terremoto] A 30-foot circle in a 600-acre park might seem like a drop in the bucket, but the idea has caught on. Terremoto expanded its Test Plot approach to other parts of Elysian Park and other parks across L.A. There are now about 15 Test Plots, including four or five that have fully established plants. By identifying degraded landscapes within parks, engaging with local groups already connected with those parks, and then asking city officials if they could temporarily intervene by adding native plants to those parks, they’ve been able to rethink planting and maintenance approaches at a larger scale. “There’s a little bit of figuring out how to pierce the bureaucracy and how to get around the otherwise really strict rules about engaging in that kind of work in public spaces,” Jones says. But in the urban context, parks departments often have to deprioritize planting and maintenance in the face of the social issues they also experience, like vandalism, drug abuse, unhoused individuals, and compromised public safety. A volunteer project like Test Plot is a welcome intervention. “[Parks departments] simply don’t have the budget to do what it takes to actually take care of a complicated urban park that faces intense urban problems,” Jones says. [Photo: Terremoto] Test pilot’s appeal for time (and budget)-strapped cities Test Plot is an appealing concept for parks who face such both budget challenges and the relentlessness of invasive species, and many across the state of California have allowed these interventions. Beyond half a dozen parks in L.A., Test Plots are adding native plants to parks in San Francisco, Berkeley, Daly City, Puente Hills, and Catalina Island. Interest in the approach has grown so much that it’s been formally spun off into a non-profit organization by the same name. Jones says the organization has received interest from parks groups across the country, including in Minnesota and Rhode Island. They are also being hired as consultants for new park projects, including a redesign of the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens that will feature an ethnobotanical garden created by the Test Plot organization. Jones says that a central element of all these Test Plots is community involvement. Volunteers are the backbone of the effort, and their ongoing engagement with the planting and weeding that Test Plot involves becomes a kind of reinforcement for the park’s vitality. “We have people come and they form a bond with their park in a way that they didn’t before,” Jones says. “A lot of people love their parks because they take their dogs on walks, it’s where they run, it’s where they walk with their friends. But there’s a whole new layer of bonding when your hands are in the soil and you are taking care of the land yourself.”
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Kendrick Lamar. Drake. Lady Gaga. The charts of music streaming services pretty much all look the same these days, with familiar names dominating the top spotsexcept on up-and-coming Spotify competitor Audiomack. The current No. 1 album on Audiomack belongs to Nigerias Seyi Vibez, whose hypnotic Afrobeats tracks have amassed around 1.8 billion plays on the platform. Vibez is one of many African and Caribbean artists who have found breakout success on the platform. Many of them consistently draw larger audiences on Audiomack than on Spotify or Apple Music, largely due to the platforms strong presence in local markets. We are the most-used streaming service in a large swath of Africa, says Audiomack cofounder Brian Zisook. We’re No. 1 on iOS and Android in Nigeria and Ghana. The company boasts 58 billion-plus songs streamed in Nigeria alone. Half of Audiomacks audience of 40 million monthly listeners comes from the continent. Audiomacks rise in West Africa was initially unintentional, but it has since become a case study in the potential of emerging markets and how smaller music platforms can thrive alongside industry giants like Spotify and Apple Music. From a mixtape hub to an Afrobeats force When Zisook and Dave Macli founded Audiomack in New York in 2012, they just wanted to make it easier for local hip-hop DJs to distribute their mixtapes. At the time, many DJs relied on questionable file-sharing sites, creating a poor experience for fans. Those websites were strewn with pop-up [ads] and malware, Zisook recalls. If you downloaded a mixtape, you had to worry that you were going to crash your family computer. Audiomack grew steadily in Western markets, but never really broke through against its much bigger competitors. All that changed seemingly overnight in 2019 when West African musicians and their fans began flocking to the service en masse. We just took off, Zisook says. The growth was a hockey stick. To adapt, Macli and Zisook hired a local team in Nigeria, gaining valuable insights into their new market. The mistake that so many in the industry made was to view Africa as a monolith, Zisook says. If you are in Tanzania or Liberia, nothing is going to offend you more than only being served Nigerian, Ghanaian, or South African songs. Betting on Africa as a growth market for music streaming is savvy, believes MIDiA Research senior music industry analyst Tatiana Cirisano. As Western markets reach saturation, most future streaming growth will come from Global South regions, of which Africa is an important part, she argues. It was smart for Audiomack to position itself as a key player here. Betting on Africas music boom Cirisano cautions, however, that business models that work in the West may not easily translate to emerging markets. African countries have a lower average revenue per user than countries like the U.S. and U.K., she says. Even though Africas impact on global music culture and consumption continues to grow, its impact on global music revenue is not matching that growth. It’s very difficult to monetize music in Africa, acknowledges Zisook. You have a young audience that has limited or no disposable income, and a lack of access to credit and debit cards. They pay for things online using gift cards. So there’s no opportunity for consistent subscriptions. There’s a lot of churn. They have hard capped data plans, and they have unreliable or no Wi-Fi. Audiomack responded to this by striking bundling deals with local cellphone carriers. The company also integrated alternative revenue streams for musicians: Fans can become direct financial supporters of their favorite artists on the platform, and in exchange get badges and bragging rights. Its a clever way for Audiomack to differentiate itself from the competition, Cirisano contends, noting, The traditional streaming business doesnt monetize fandom, or depth of engagementit monetizes pure consumption. Thriving alongside giants like Spotify Scaling a business works for streaming giants like Spotify, which recently reported its first full year of profitability. But it has been much more challenging for second-tier services like Tidal, which reportedly laid off 100 staffers last fall. Audiomack could provide a blueprint for these smaller services to compete with, and prosper alongside the big guys. In addition to further growing its user base in Africa, Audiomack also courts expats across Western markets. A lot of our growth in Canada, U.K., Germany, and France is diasporic, Zisook says. Ghanaians in Germany, Nigerians in France. At the same time, the company is striking licensing agreements with major labels to gain access to more of their catalogs. This attracts Western listeners familiar with hip-hop while introducing them to Seyi Vibez and other Afrobeats stars. That way, Audiomack can become a complementary service for Western audiences looking to dive deeper into different music genres. The same folks who listen to Spotify at work might use Audiomack later in the day to more actively discover music, express their fandom, and access a catalog that is not available on mainstream streaming services, Cirisano says.
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Teenage YouTube users across the world will now get automatic reminders to go to bed and take a break from their screens. YouTube announced this week it was expanding such reminders to minors across the globe, ensuring they are full-screen and toggled-on by default. The feature first debuted in the U.S. seven years ago, and went automatic for minors in 2023. So-called “bedtime” notifications have grown in popularity, buoyed in large part by YouTube and TikTok. But it’s unclear how effective the notifications are in the first place. After all, YouTube users only have to click to close out the banner; on TikTok, its even easier to keep swiping past the text. It will be effective for a small proportion of people, but the onus is still on the user to turn it off, says Jon-Patrick Allem, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers School of Public Health. These are all cosmetic things that may work for some people, but arent really going to shift user behavior. The rise of stop scrolling signs YouTube first introduced their overuse warnings back in 2018. At first, it was a simple opt-in take a break notification. By 2020, YouTube revealed that theyd sent more than three billion warnings, and added a bedtime reminder to their suite. This is the same year that TikTok also premiered their screentime management ads, headed by popular creators like Alan Chikin Chow and Gabe Erwin. A few years later, parents amplified concerns about their childrens social media usage. More and more data flooded the web about a teen mental health crisis, with an uptick in depression and anxiety. YouTube responded in 2023 by making their take a break and bedtime reminders more prominent on the screen, and making them mandatory for all American users under 18. TikTok debuted their own sleep reminder and silenced push notifications for users under 18 after 10 p.m. Now, YouTubes changes are global. In a LinkedIn post, Pedro Pina, YouTubes head of Europe, Middle East and Africa, wrote that the program ensures teens time on the platform is well spent. (YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.) But these reminders are still just suggestions: Rutgers’s Allem says that users see them as recommendations for best options, advice that theyre unlikely to take. There is no consequence if an individual acts or doesn’t act on this prompt, he says. It would probably be just as easy as moving on from the post like anything else you werent interested in. The one second that you take determining this isnt interesting so you keep scrolling, would that really be impactful? What does it take for us to actually log off? Beyond some limited content moderation, these warnings are the furthest major social media companies have gone to protect teens from addiction and overuse. But, in the wake of Jonathan Haidts The Anxious Generation and 2024s great upheaval around internet mental health, every pundit has their own ideas for further steps. The Surgeon General recommended cigarette-style warning labels; the State of New York demanded companies tamp down on their recommendation algorithms for minors. Allem rattles off a list of changes that would be more effective at stopping social media overuse. They could mandate lock-outs for minors during nighttime hours. They could force users to pay for increased hours using their apps. Or, the apps could be redesigned all together. Theres no natural stopping point for platforms designed with infinite scroll online, Allem says. We could consider default settings that were programmed to limit use, rather than allowing for unlimited use. But none of these changers are likely to happen anytime soon. All of this can be done quite easily, Allem says. It isnt done because it will tap into and reduce growth and profit.
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