The exclusive, multi-year partnership, announced last week at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, merges Livio Radio’s expertise in developing consumer electronics products and accessories with the global availability offered by Grooveshark’s catalog of 7 million songs.

Livio Radio founder and CEO Jake Sigal said the deal would continue his company’s philosophy of offering consumers more music with less work.

Until now, stations on Pandora were created when listeners entered the name of a favorite artist, song, or composer. The new genre stations give listeners a different path into the world of personalized radio, where simple ‘thumbs-up’ and ‘thumbs-down’ actions let people shape the stations to their individual tastes.

Senior Music Curator Michael Zapruder said, “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.”

Genre stations include Today’s Hits, Classic Rock, 80′s Pop, Alternative, Blues, Christian, Classical, Country and more. You can see the full list here on the Pandora website.

Pandora is only available in the USA, but can be accessed via several WiFi radios including the Grace Allegro.

84% of this group regularly listens for at least five minutes to AM/FM simulcast streams in a typical week while 62% of the total streaming group regularly listens for at least five minutes listening to Internet-only streams.

Read more at Bridge Ratings

This launch sees two of the world’s leading Internet radio companies joining forces to offer consumers more variety and choice than ever before.  By partnering with some of the best Internet radio device manufacturers around, Pandora will see its already huge following increase even further.

Radios from C Crane, Grace Digital, Livio, Sonoro and Tangent Audio now boast the highly acclaimed personalized radio experience and all include real-time feedback to the consumers’ online Pandora account.

Jessica Steel, Pandora’s senior vice president of business development said “Our aim has always been to make our service available to as many users as possible via as many delivery mechanisms as possible. The partnership with Reciva shows that Pandora is continuing its commitment to give our users the ultimate choice”.

Ben Terrell, CEO of Reciva stated “Pandora has always been at the forefront of our thinking when integrating world leading music services into the Reciva platform.This is just the beginning of Pandora becoming the De-facto personalized radio experience for Internet radio device owners”

Treedia Labs develops solutions and portals around its unique digital media aggregation and distribution platform. Partnerships with companies such as Liquid Air Labs, Motorola and Reciva along with portals such as Podcast.com leverage Treedia’s unique platform to “hyper-distribute” content to the web, mobile devices, and consumer electronics.

Reciva is the technology provider behind most of the world’s WiFi Internet radio devices available in the market today. More than 40 consumer electronics companies including Bush, Intempo, Revo, Sangean and Tangent use Reciva’s technology platform making Reciva the clear leader in the market for next generation radios.

Reciva-powered radios allow users easy and convenient access to thousands or live radio stations, on-demand radio programs and podcasts from across the world without the need for a PC. Such choice might sound intimidating, but finding content is as easy as turning the dial on a traditional radio set. Except now, turning the dial doesn’t mean tuning into specific radio frequencies: instead, web addresses for specific online radio stations or archived radio programs and podcasts are being accessed through the radio.

Treedia Labs, through its Podcast.com branded content hub, will provide curated podcast content to Reciva-powered radios.

“We’re pleased to partner with Reciva to deliver content to their growing base of Internet Radio devices,” said Duncan Perry, COO of Treedia Labs. “Reciva’s technology and products will enable millions of people worldwide to consume podcast content with devices that could easily replace the terrestrial radio devices.”

Content from Podcast.com will increase the existing selection to over 55 thousand podcast channels across a full range of genres. Reflecting the global nature of Reciva’s user base, content will include international content in 15 languages from across the globe.

“Podcast.com has a first-class collection of podcast content,” said Ben Terrell, Chief Executive Officer of Reciva Limited. “This partnership significantly expands the variety and choice of quality audio content and will benefit our device partners in terms of creating an unparalleled device offering targeted at today’s radio listener.”

Samuel Chang, Accton’s Vice President said, ‘The internet radio module is ideal for home audio equipment manufacturers to add additional features to their receivers while keeping manufacturing costs down’.

‘The inherent challenge in integrating digital and networking protocols with traditional audio equipment can be addressed with one module and allows audio equipment manufacturers to enter the emerging internet radio market, projected to reach 8 million units in 2009′.

Accton’s internet radio modules can connect with more than 10,000 internet radio stations worldwide, offering users an alternative to receiving localised radio stations, while the content can be streamed globally, in various languages and formats.

The module is compatible with all popular internet radio station listings and portals and can even be customised to individual OEM preferred listings.

The device can connect with home networked computers via uPnP, allowing users to experience their music through high-fidelity home audio entertainment systems.