I love Last FM. I reckon it’s the single best web application for music consumers currently out there, and it wins on all sorts of fronts. I have an ongoing love affair with it and have been using it as a mainstay of my online music listening. But it just went sour.

One of the great things about Last FM is that it can deal with complexity well. It constantly surprises me and feels comfortable and familiar at the same time by playing me tracks I like by artists I like, based on data compiled from my own listening to my own music.

It’s pretty clever – and it often recommends music I don’t know based on that same data. In a sense, I’m making my own recommendations to myself. I knew that artists and labels were encouraged to submit their own tracks and that this was adding to the diversity.

But in the last half an hour it played me the same song twice with the ominous words ‘RECOMMENDED BY EMI’ along the top of the player.

Think you know me, Last FM? Then don’t paste a label on your front counter that says ‘We have turned to the dark side’.

Don’t get me wrong… I liked the song. It was Over and Over by Hot Chip. Actually, I thought it was pretty cool, and I was motivated to go and find out more about it – but I was also cross.

Of course it’s not a major issue – and of course listening to music more than once is how we grow to like it. And it’s not even like I boycott music from major labels. Far from it. I actively purchase music that happens to be on major labels. Let’s leave aside the fact that I actively overlook the connection between label brands and the artists I enjoy.

I might rush out and buy whatever the Gorillaz or Madonna (for instance) put out – but I’m not going to keep an eye on the shelves for the new Sony BMG or EMI release. The idea that they’d recommend something to me – or that it would be a selling point is nonsense. But that’s not the point.

It’s just that suddenly there was a discrepancy between my idea of Last FM and my experience of Last FM.

It had been an entirely effort-free way to enjoy music online, while doing everything an online music service should do. It’s free (give or take), it will surprise, it will reflect and reinforce your tastes, it’s organic, it learns from your interaction with it, it can manage eclecticism well. It’s head and shoulders above most such services (especially the dreadful and inexplicably popular Pandora).

Only now, it’s opened a door to the major labels, told them what I like and invited them to market directly to me in an internet-enabled twist on their old-fashioned commercial radio ways.

And it’s EMI. They’re the people who made us all so cross on Grey Tuesday – remember?

Meanwhile – Hot Chip are doing all good stuff. They have a MySpace page and their ‘friends’ include a number of acts I quite like (‘Shit Robot‘ was a recent mp3 blog discovery). They’re on DFA Records – the same label as LCD Soundsystem and The Juan MacLean.

Leaving aside the source of the recommendation, chances are it was a good call.

I don’t know if EMI have a P&D deal with DFA – or whether they’re the parent company – but they have become involved with my little world in a way I hadn’t expected – and those three little words ‘Recommended by EMI‘ just made it all yucky.

Still love you, Last FM… but that was Strike One. Three strikes and you’re out.

Update: Moments after I posted this, my Last FM player made an apology by recommending M. Ward – who I’d never heard and will probably be my next music purchase.