Hi Mooney Astro Warm Leatherette Spectacular Starr. With curated playlists, there's two types - one type, usually playlists with less listeners, are independent, like you or I could make one. Actually I have one I made here on Pandora. And you could make one, a curated playlist, right here on Pandora (or on most other streaming sites). And people could find your curated playlist and discover songs on it, exactly as you describe. The problem is, unless you advertise, you probably won't have many listeners, because there's a LOT of playlists out there.
So what you could try to get your song on a curated playlist with more listeners is to either a) find playlists that might be good fits for your songs, then see if you can figure out how to contact the curator based on the limited information you see on the playlist, or b) use a service like submithub to submit your songs to curators with reasonable-sized playlists for the cost of around $2 a pop (some less some more).
There are also curated editorial playlists, run by staff at places like Pandora and other streaming sites, and some of the largest playlists are editorial playlists. One thing that wasn't obvious to me at first, and this comment is applying to Spotify and not necessarily Pandora, but I would expect it to be similar on Pandora, is that to get on any of the really big and important editorial playlists, one first needs to be considered (by Spotify any way) in the top 50%-60% of their most popular artists. And by popular, I mean artists with lots of high quality, recent streams. You can google "Spotify Popularity Index" to understand more. And to have an artist popularity index that high, one needs to have multiple really popular songs.
