Pandora announced today that it is giving users the ability to launch genre-based Internet radio stations.  While Pandora is known for the creation of personalized stations, based on artists or songs, this gives users the opportunity to listen to broader stations, while remaining in their musical comfort zone.

"Our listeners have been telling us for a while that they’d like an easy way to start a station from popular genres with the option to personalize the station from there," says Senior Music Curator Michael Zapruder. "We wanted to find a uniquely Pandora way to address this consumer need so we created a number of genre stations that are carefully seeded with relevant songs and constantly refreshed with new releases."

This should indeed make Pandora a more useful tool for music discoverability. It should make for a good way to find unknown artists within a given genre that may or may not be considered similar to an artist a user already likes. There is a reason this feature has been heavily requested.

The stations include genres like:

– Today’s Hits
– Today’s Adult Hits
– Today’s Hip Hop and R&B Hits
– 80’s Pop
– Today’s Country
– Classic Rock
– Today’s Hip Hop and Pop Hits
– Smooth Jazz
– Today’s R&B and Old School
– Club/Dance
– Today’s Alternative
– Love Songs

There are over 100 micro-genre stations that users can choose from.

Last month, Pandora announced that it had surpassed its 60 million-user milestone. Recent integration with Facebook has attracted some more interest to the site. It was a launch partner for Facebook’s Open Graph. Mobile apps will no doubt continue to fuel growth as well.