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"Ever surf on over to Pandora to create a new station and find yourself stumped as to what artist or song to create a playlist around? Well, now the Internet radio service has added a new option for less decisive users: Genre.\nUntil today, Pandora has been all about music discovery \u2014 creating meticulously curated stations around certain musicians, songs and composers. Well, according to Senior Music Curator Michael Zapruder, \"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. 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.\"\nNow users have the option of listening to everything from genre stations like \"Today's Hits\" and \"Today's Country\" (which are some of the most popular stations already) to micro-stations like \"Christmas Blues\" and \"Today's College Indie.\" There are more than 100 micro-stations in all. (We'll see how curated these genres become over time \u2014 I was a bit distressed that the first song that came up for \"Today's Alternative\" was The Offspring's \"Come Out and Play.\" I was not aware that \"today\" was 1994...). \nWith this move, Pandora joins the ranks of the majority of music discovery services and Internet radio sites, which already offer the \"Genre\" option \u2014 including Last.fm, YouTube Music and Songza. \nWhat do you think of Pandora's decision to add genre to the mix? Does it make it easier to find new music? Or does it cut down on the degree of specialization that the service has come to be associated with?\nUpdate: A few commenters mentioned that they have had access to genres for a while. This is partly true. According to a Pandora representative: \"A limited number of Genres were an option as a pre-existing station, but they were never a personalized seed, like an artist, song or composer could be. Now Pandora is allowing genres to be a seed for a personalized user station for the very first time. The difference is the ability to customize/personalize, as well as more current content and chart toppers within these genres. This change was really driven by user feedback.\" \n[img credit: [nati]]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/08/24/pandora-genre/>