I think there’s also an element of the hit tracks often being a bit more formulaic. There’s a big component of familiarity in music that makes it appealing, so people might not appreciate the more experimental tracks on an album until they’ve heard them a few times.
You can have a rational basis for a belief without empirical evidence (Russell’s teapot, for example). The reason you’d want to do that is to simplify the model of reality you’re working with in order to reduce the number of contingencies you need to account for.
Sure, but the compatibilist view is, in my understanding, that determinism is true, but we still have free will. The mind is so complex its deterministic function can’t be fully predicted, so the outcome of particular inputs over any meaningful duration cannot be computed. Thus actual free will and the illusion of free are essentially functionally identical.