Call me crazy, but I think Google has the best music app in the world.

Google Play Music is my top pick after months of research and testing. It was a surprising conclusion given how little people talk about the app and how much people talk about its competition. The closer I looked, however, the more I was convinced that people have this wrong.

Play Music is available in a $10 on-demand version and a free radio version. The on-demand version goes head-to-head with Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, and others. The free version competes with Spotify, Pandora, and others.

We don’t know how many people use it, since Google, unlike its competitors, has never released subscriber numbers. We do know it comes on every Android phone and, whether people know it or not, included with every Google account.

What makes Play Music so good? It comes down to three main points.

1) Play Music is the best at predicting what you want to listen to when.

When you load the app, you’ll see a selection of moments it thinks are relevant based on your habits, with each of those moments opening up to a selection of music based on your tastes.

Below you can see how, on a Tuesday afternoon, it helped me find the focus-friendly classical station, “Music for a Small Room”:

And here’s how, on a Tuesday evening, it helped me find “Blue-Eyed Soul: The 80s” — a mix of 1980s pop and R&B fusion that’s great for unwinding.

Google got a hold of this system when it bought context-focused music app Songza in 2014 and has been developing it ever since.

“We’ve had a long time to get good at what it takes to be good at that,” Play Music project manager and Songza founder Elias Roman said. He added about working at Google: “It’s a really complete and exciting and brilliant team. [We’ve] been very, very happy working with them.”

No other app comes close at contextually personalized recommendations.

Although Spotify is planning to do a lot more here, it has “just started investing a lot of effort in trying to understand user behaviors at different times and different contexts they’re in,” lead software engineer Edward Newett said. For now, Spotify’s main tab, called Browse, shows the same selection of playlists to everyone, with only minor adjustments for time of day.

Apple Music and others are even further behind.

2) Play Music matches the competition on almost everything else.

Despite what you might hear about cultural and acoustic analysis at Spotify and the Music Genome Project at Pandora, I’ve heard that every service uses the same basic strategy for getting to know your preferences. Called collaborative filtering, it’s where you predict what one user will like based on what similar users like, and it’s something that anyone with a sophisticated team and enough data can do.

One source who worked on Spotify’s system told us outright: “The data advantage that Spotify has isn’t substantial compared to Apple and Google.”

I certainly wasn’t able to notice a big difference in general recommendations from the top players — though Tidal is a step behind with almost no personalization.

Below you can see Play Music’s solid recommendations for me:

What else is there?

Despite the hype about Apple’s supposedly revolutionary human curation, the truth is that all of these apps have human curators.

Despite headlines about music exclusives at one place or another, most of the big apps have extremely similar libraries of 30 million tracks — though Pandora is a step behind with only 1 million.

Yes, Play Music doesn’t have as active a social community as Spotify, but that will matter to relatively few. Yes, it doesn’t offer lossless streaming like Deezer and Tidal, but that, too, won’t matter to many.

3) Play Music has snazzy bonus features.

All Play Music users can store up to 50,000 tracks for free in the cloud. It is the perfect home for the digital music collection you’ve been lugging around since college and a great way to help the app get to know your tastes. So far as I can tell, no other service has a comparable free feature.

A Play Music subscription comes bundled with access to YouTube Red, letting you watch any video without ads and stream special shows. For anyone who watches a lot of online videos, that’s a great perk.

Finally, Play Music works perfectly on Sonos. The same can’t be said of Spotify, which for some reason doesn’t include its Discovery tab in the Sonos app, which means you’re left with an almost entirely non-personalized experience.

Your next music app is …

It’s true there are good things about other apps.

Spotify may be the best at finding hot new music. It has playlists that a lot of people love, even if there is not currently a lot of personalization in how they are displayed. It has the most active social community. $10 for ad-free service, it also has the only free service that gives you on-demand access.

Deezer is a fairly sophisticated app, and it has a lossless streaming option that will appeal to a small number of customers. It costs $10 for on-demand access and is currently available in the US only to Sonos customers.

Apple Music is a fairly sophisticated app, even if it’s crammed with features no one cares about like the Connect social network, and it has some music exclusives. It costs $10 for on-demand access, nothing to listen to live Beats 1 radio.

Pandora makes good custom radio with a wonderfully simple interface, though Play Music and others have comparably sophisticated custom radio with a much larger library as well as other stuff. It costs nothing for ad-supported radio and $4 for ad-free. It has said it is working on an on-demand service, too.

Tidal is pretty limited when it comes to personalized recommendations, which is a major failing in a music service. It does have some music exclusives and a lossless streaming option, costing $10 for basic and $20 for lossless.

Play Music? It’s got the most personalization, with an interface that leaves the rest in the dust, plus a robust array of features and some powerful bonuses. Free for radio and online storage and $10 for on-demand, it is the most complete music service out there and a great choice for everyone.

It's just one more thing that Google is quietly revolutionizing.