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Global music streaming service leader Spotify will reportedly soon offer ad-supported streaming radio in every country in which it operates.

Pandora, the leader in Internet radio, hasn't successfully negotiated licenses to operate outside the U.S., (and recently) Australia and New Zealand.

Spotify's main service is subscription-based, on-demand streaming. They do, however, offer a free, ad-supported, non-interactive streaming radio service as well. And while the service hasn't generated many rave reviews (we don't know about actual usage), especially when compared to Pandora, the move gives Spotify access to an audience Pandora doesn't have.

Three anonymous sources told Bloomberg Spotify is close to finalizing deals with record labels for the service, which is planned to launch next month.

Read more in Bloomberg here.

CBS Interactive-owned music service Last.fm has announced it will shut down its online radio service in all but eight countries, "due to licensing restrictions."

While U.S., UK, and German listeners will still be able to use the Last.fm radio service free via the website, radio via the Last.fm desktop application in those nations will become solely a subscription-based service (ad-supported free radio via apps had been available to users in those countries). Mobile access to Last.fm radio (since April 2011) has been subscription-only, and will remain so.

Elsewhere in the world, Last.fm's radio service has been subscription-only since 2009. It will remain so for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Brazil. But elsewhere, Last.fm online radio will entirely cease on January 15.

The cost of licensing copyright sound recordings has always been, and continues to be, inhibitive to online music companies in the U.S. and elsewhere.

2012 marked the tenth anniversary of Last.fm's founding. It was purchased by CBS in 2007, and remains based in England.

Last.fm also announced an upcoming revamped desktop client.

Last.fm features a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler," which compiles details of users' music habits ("scrobbling") -- on Internet radio stations, local files, or portable devices -- and builds a detailed profile of each user's musical tastes. It's this database that powers Last.fm's music recommendation capability.

Read the Last.fm announcement here.

The U.S. mobile music industry will see its ad-driven revenues gain share over the next four years, accounting for 86% of all such revenues by 2016, if eMarketer's forecast is correct. By that time, overall mobile music revenues will hit $1.68 billion (that's from $429.3 million this year), says eMarketer. 

Ads already account for nearly 70% of mobile music revenues (the rest are split between subscription fees (17.2%) and per-song download charges (14.1%)).

Read more on the study from eMarketer here.

Meanwhile, a study commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows the ad-supported Internet economy workforce doubled between 2007 and 2011 (from a million to two million). Taking into account jobs that indirectly benefit from the Internet, that number grows to 5.1 million.

Interestingly, "most of the job growth in the Internet economy happened not in the large companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, but in smaller ventures and one-man shops sprinkled across the country. These entrepreneurial outfits – a combination of eBay sellers, self-employed web designers and app makers — contributed 375,000 of the two million jobs directly produced by the Internet ecosystem. App-making alone accounted for the equivalent of 35,000 full-time jobs, though the work was actually spread out over many more part-timers," reports a The Wall Street Journal Digits blog (which you can read here).