Under the commercial arrangement, local gigs and festivals pulled in from Last.fm will show up on Geomium’s GPS-powered iPhone app, along with existing listings such as bars, restaurants and local offers. Should attending one of those Last.fm-listed events require purchasing a ticket, users are, of course, sent Last.fm’s way where the music recommendation service gets a kick back. Geomium users can also share their intent, thus increasing the likelihood that others in their local social graph will also make a booking.

Geomium, which soft-launched back in September of last year but has since seen a broader roll out (see TCEU coverage), lets users connect with friends, meet new people and find bars, restaurants etc. as well as deals and events in their local area. Aiming to be a sort of ‘Foursquare for the rest us’, although Facebook Places is also trying to fill that void, the service is supported by and aggregates data from Yelp, Qype, Eventful and now Last.fm, putting the user and their location at the centre of the app rather than one specific data set or use-case scenario. Additionally, Geomium shuns the gaming metrics of other location-based services.

Geomium has raised seed funding from London-based angel investors, although there has been talk of raising an A-round. The company revealed back in November that a month in from launching it had seen more than 100,000 downloads of the Geomium iPhone app.

Today, We7 is shifting focus once again in the belief that the route to mass market requires a lean-back experience more akin to Internet radio services like Pandora in the U.S. rather than a pure on-demand play such as European competitor Spotify. It’s also a model that sits more comfortably with We7′s ad-supported aspirations since music licensing fees for Internet radio are about a third of that charged for non subscription on-demand services.

The new service and strategy, dubbed “Internet Radio Plus” (a name given the seal of approval by recent We7 users, 10,000 of whom were surveyed on the issue), came about after We7 quietly rolled out a simple radio function in January this year. Without any marketing push, by September more than 55% of tracks on the site were being accessed through the radio feature rather than on-demand, says We7 CEO Steve Purdham. “This is a massive hint on how people want to listen to music.”

After that initial experiment, the company has concluded that what the majority of people want is the simplicity, no effort required, aspect of traditional radio – press a button and listen – with the personalisation opportunities that on-demand offers. Purdham summarises this philosophy as “entertain me but let me have control when I want it”.

On that note – no pun intended – We7′s new Internet Radio Plus focus will begin with ‘Loved Radio’, a personal radio channel that can be created at any time by the user pressing ‘love’ on an artist, song, album or playlist. These choices will then influence what is played going forward. It’s not a new idea but one that certainly fits with my own online listening habits. Additionally, users can share their ‘loved’ station with friends via Facebook, Twitter or through email.

More innovative, however, is that personalisation will also go beyond music to include spoken audio with News, Entertainment, Sport, Weather and “a series of yet to be announced innovations”, building on the news bulletin feature that We7 rolled out in conjunction with GMG Radio back in July. Better still, the company plans to evolve Internet Radio Plus to eventually allow users to include a news alert if anything happens with a chosen football team, for example, or related to other personal interest areas. Now that would be truly personal.

We7 is also keen to talk up the advantage of all of this personalisation and music residing in the cloud, meaning that in theory it can travel with the listener and be accessed from anywhere. A direct quote from the press release reads: “What defines an individual’s music tastes is not their CD or download library but the metadata about the music they like and when they listen to it”, which I think sums up quite nicely the opportunity that We7 is now embracing.

But let’s not forget the economics of all of this either, which we’ve touched on already. Rightly or wrongly, the Internet radio model, which imposes arcane rules such as how many tracks by the same artist can be played sequentially etc., has a different royalty rate to ‘on-demand’. And that’s music to Purdham’s ears.

“I have to admit that this positive consumer shift to radio streams does benefit the economics of the We7 financial model”, he concedes. Although he also notes that Internet radio fees are still more expensive than traditional terrestrial radio.

So, yes, along with feedback from users, economics has clearly played its part, which along with Pandora’s growth in the U.S., “made it one of those no brainer business decisions”, says Purdham.

It also, perhaps conveniently, moves We7 slightly further away from comparisons to Spotify, which remains very much an on-demand play. Who then is We7′s closest competitor now? “Standard radio services listened to on the Internet”, says Purdhmam.

But what about Last.fm?

An “obvious choice”, but Purdham argues that the CBS-owned Internet radio service appeals to a different audience than We7, “such as the early adopter tech savvy music obsessives who are looking for discovery, whereas We7 is my mum, sister, wife, daughter and son.”

Instead, “becoming the Pandora plus of the UK and Europe would be a great aspiration to have”, he says.

Using MXP4′s technology, Last.fm is to begin offering brands the option to create ads that users of the music streaming and discovery service can interact with, such as remixing a track in realtime or “singing along in karaoke mode”, all within the ad itself. In a way it’s similar in concept to Apple’s new iAds in the sense that ads become fully blown apps. And obviously, a music oriented app is a perfect fit for Last.fm.

MXP4 is describing the concept as a “game like music experience”. Brands will be able to create sponsored pages that integrate MXP4’s “FanMix”, “Remix It”, “Max It” and “Sing It” (see our previous coverage), as well as social gaming features such as “Karaoke Battle”. The type of interactivity incorporated includes being able to turn instruments on and off for a particular track, combine different versions of the same song, or sing along as lyrics scroll across the player. That sounds like a lot more fun than a static audio or banner ad.

And it pays off for advertisers too, says MXP4, claiming that music fans use the company’s applications for an average of 9.1 minutes per session, and that click through rates to purchase goods online have exceeded 3%. It’s on that basis that MXP4 says it’s talking with all major music platforms, specifically name checking Spotify and Deezer. That said, MXP4′s VP of Business Development Jeff Marois is ex-Last.fm so perhaps this particular deal was easier to pull off.

MXP4, based in Paris, is well funded having raised $13m to date, including its most recent round of $4 million led by Paris-based Goojet funder Orkos Capital, and involving previous investor Sofinnova (which backs Streamezzo) and Ventech (in Eyeka).

Users of the MP3 download store and media player can now link their Last.fm account to the app, enabling them to ‘scrobble’ tracks played on their mobile phone and send listening data to the Last.fm website in real-time.

As a result, the ‘Now Playing’ status on a user’s Last.fm profile is constantly updated and the music streaming service’s music recommendations will, of course, also improve.

It’s not the first time that 7digital and Last.fm have hooked up though. Last.fm already integrates 7digital’s MP3 store so that users can, optionally, purchase streaming tracks for download. So in a sense the BlackBerry app’s Last.fm integration is reciprocal, creating greater synergy between the two offerings.

Further enhancements to 7digital’s BlackBerry app include improved artist search within the download store, support for the BlackBerry Curve 8350i, and Netherlands store support and localisation with local artist tracks and albums.

The app and accompanying store also expands its reach with additional country access for 15 European countries: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia.

7digital says that its BlackBerry app has been downloaded over 200,000 times since its launch.

Until now, Spotify has relied on editorially-driven data provided by AllMusic, who will continue to provide artist biographies for the service. In contrast, the new artist recommendations are powered by an algorithm that cross-references data collected over millions of user listening hours, not dissimilar it seems to Last.fm’s ‘scrobbling’ of tracks. The new feature, which connects the entire catalogue of artists, is the product of Spotify’s R&D team who have been working on it over the past few months.

Users will experience the result via a new ‘Related Artists’ tab as part of the artist overview page, “letting them seek out similar sounds much more easily by clicking on the artist icons.”