There used to be hundreds or even thousands of personal stations out
there but I never really pursued that even though there might be some
gems there. Just don't have time to dig around and find them.

Pandora is good and the music genome idea seems cool. I have two
problems with it though. First is that it makes no distinction in
terms of the quality of the music. This makes sense since the genome
approach just looks at objective measurable qualities of a piece of
music, not subjective ones. Reminds me of the old music analysis
classes. I did a do wop station once and it got the style/genre right
but the music it played was all sub-par examples of do wop - basically
a bunch of B-sides. The second problem with Pandora is the lack of
classical (especially 20th century) music. This makes sense since the
genomic aspects of this music must be incredibly complex - thousands
of years of music there with an incredible amount of stylistic
differences. I understand they are adding this though and I look
forward to their implementation.

Lately I've been listening to LastFM alot mostly because I get to hear
a lot of 20th century "classical" stuff.
how do you get these stations? On the LastFM player, click on the wrench for settings. Click on the search tab. Make sure "similar artist radio" is selected in the dropdown field. In the field below that, type in artist name. I've done Arvo Part (hoping for mellow drone-zone, chant type of music), Harry Partch, and Steve Reich. Pretty good results though I do fast forward on occassion.

If I want to listen to 60's-70's pop like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell,
Beatles, Zappa, etc. then Launchcast seems to play the best
selections. I don't do that often though because I find it hard to
work with vocal music going. It's great for when I'm cooking or
cleaning my room though :)