A company called mSpot beat Google and Amazon to the punch a few years ago by offering an online music storage locker that allows users to upload songs to the cloud and stream them to any desktop web browser or to mobile devices for Android or iOS. Now mSpot is stepping up its game by combining its music locker service with an internet radio service.

Here’s how it works: You upload your music, fire up the app on your mobile device and start listening to the songs you already own. But when you want to listen to something new you just tap a button and mSpot will create a personalized internet radio station based on the song or artist you’re currently listening to. It’s sort of like Pandora, but you don’t have to manually enter a search term. Just let mSpot you want to hear more songs like the one you’re already enjoying. Of course, you can also search manually if you want.

The mSpot Music service also tracks the playlists of existing internet radio stations and sometimes recommends some of these stations as well as the personalized station. The app can also keep track of songs you’ve played recently to get a sense of your listening habits so that it can recommend additional stations you might like from the primary radio menu.

A new mSpot Music beta is available from the Android Market today. An iOS app will follow later.

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One of the things that’s always seemed a bit odd about Pandora’s excellent internet radio service is that it doesn’t sort music by genre. Instead, you pick a song or artist you like, and Pandora will populate a custom-made radio station with songs that are similar in one way or another. Generally this works pretty well and it makes Pandora an excellent service for finding unfamiliar songs and artists you might like. But sometimes it seems like it would be a whole lot easier to just pick a genre to get started.

Someone at Pandora apparently feels the same way, because tomorrow Pandora will launch new genre-based stations. For instance, you’ll be able to select stations such as “Love Songs,” “Classic Rock,” “Today’s Hits,” or “80′s Pop” to get started. You can further personalie the stations by giving songs the thumbs up or thumbs down.

All told, Pandora will be offering over 100 genre stations, which you’ll be able to find at pandora.com/genres or by clicking the “Create a New Station” panel.

You can access Pandora on the web at Pandora.com. There are also mobile apps for iPhone, Android, WebOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile. The new genre-based stations feature should be available Wednesday, August 25th.

Just moments after Apple released iOS 4, internet radio service Pandora launched an updated iOS app which supports the operating system’s new multitasking features.

Specifically, you can now run Pandora in the background so that it will continue to play music while you’re using a different app in the foreground. In order to bring up the media playback buttons, you don’t have to close out of an app and switch back to Pandora. Just double-tap the Home button and swipe to the left to bring up on-screen media playback buttons.

My iPod touch doesn’t support multitasking, so I haven’t been able to fully test the new app. But Christina Warren at Mashable took it for a spin. You can check out her hands-on video after the break.

Pandora for iOS is available as a free download from the App Store.

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