Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

There's at least a part of me that thinks the other side of that coin is innovation.  Satellite radio may not be a good example (I don't know much about it, but it's the example you used, so I'm sticking with it), but regardless of price and customer satisfaction with price, how much innovation are we not getting due to lack of competition?  We can never assert counterfactuals with perfect confidence, but competition is a reliable and tested driver of innovation.  Regardless of price, would we have cooler satellite radio without SiriusXM?

What's more likely is that in a split market where you had two competitors for a limited demand product, they simply wouldn't have both been able to survive. So you can allow them to merge and be a monopoly, or they can battle it out for 5 years, one go bankrupt while the other absorbs their subscriber base, and then you have... A monopoly. 

And remember, SiriusXM *does* have competitors. Their competitors are terrestrial radio, streaming, podcasting, audiobooks, MP3/CDs, etc. They need to innovate to try to entice customers to pay for something when many of their competitors are free services. 

So it's not right to act like there isn't a competitive market...  

When people stop paying the high prices, then the universities will stop increasing them.  I dropped my season tickets 9 years ago because the cost was just too much for me and I had other priorities.  But apparently there were plenty of people lined up behind me.

This is one, tiny reason the non-wealthy don't like the wealthy.  
They always pay the high prices.  A tiny percentage of the group makes it so the much larger percentage of the group do not have access.  
And that can be frustrating.

Folks often invest in a thing and become part owners hoping to earn money.  If an investment doesn’t pay me a reasonable mount I don’t buy, or sell if I did.

Since 2000 I doubt I've stopped at McDonalds more than 4X for myself and that was usually when pressed for time and needed coffee and a quick filler for breakfast.Stop there maybe 2X a year for Cindy

And yet, so many of the things that people try to overcomplicate can be adequately explained with a simple supply & demand curve.

Oh, I didn't mean they're useless, or have no explanatory power.  Quite the contrary. 

What I mean is, they're just models.  Like a linear regression line is a predictive model for a population.  Supply and demand curves show us what would be without any exterior factors....noise, as the stats nerds call it.  There are government regulations, a variety of categories of barriers to both consumers and suppliers, and things that we don't have a good explanation for.  Those are added to the fact that a real, unfettered, capitalist market is slow, takes time to adjust and settle, but never quite settles, because it's always changing....evolving.  In that regard, the theoretical equilibrium point where the supply and demand curves intersect, is a bit of a myth.  

BUT.  That doesn't mean those curves aren't good models.  I only meant that they have some margin of error; sometimes narrow, sometimes wide, sometimes for a prolonged period of time, sometimes for a short period of time.  But we should mostly think in those terms, because good models are the best predictors we have.  When I say no market or the people in it are actually governed by them, I mean that the supply/demand curves have some impreciseness that introductory lessons on Economics (in my experience) don't tend to inform you about, which changes the real-world usefulness a little bit.  But I'm adamant that the concepts are foundational, and have to be taught first, before digging into other things that complicate the models.  

Yeah, and really, things like corporate greed are just part of the supply curve in a fair market.  So I don't even view them as mutually exclusive.  The demand curve still has a major impact on equilibrium price, regardless of corporate greed.  Again, in a fair market.  

Grumpy side tangent:  job requirements are one thing that screw that up a little bit.  Effectively, I have to have a smart phone for my position.  Even though it's not explicitly stated, there's things I need to be able to do in certain situations that I couldn't otherwise do (and unfortunately the state does not pay for our smart phones, even though we kinda have to have them).  A few years ago I realized I was sick of smart phones and would go back to a flip-phone if I could.  I seldom use any "smart" functionality, and I'm a prime example of the studies which show that people who use them less are happier, less depressed, etc.  When I realized that, it drove down my usage even that much more.  And, frankly, I don't like what has become of social settings with everyone's face buried in their phones.  So someone like me, in a free(r) market, might just say "no thanks" and once there's enough of us, the price of the damn things is bound to come down.  But I (we) can't.  The market has at least a small portion of it artificially propped up because real demand is not reflected in situations like mine.  There might not be nearly enough people like me in the same position for it to matter.  But the potential is one of the real-world things I'm pointing to.  

So someone like me, in a free(r) market, might just say "no thanks" and once there's enough of us, the price of the damn things is bound to come down.  But I (we) can't.  The market has at least a small portion of it artificially propped up because real demand is not reflected in situations like mine.  There might not be nearly enough people like me in the same position for it to matter.  But the potential is one of the real-world things I'm pointing to. 

That said, I'd argue your smartphone demand is still real demand. It's not entirely freely chosen by you--rather it's imposed on you by circumstances that make it necessary--but it's real demand. 

It's like the demand for gasoline. I'd prefer not to use as much gasoline as I do. I'd prefer to WFH all 5 days a week in which case I wouldn't need to consume nearly as much. But I make the choice of going in 3 days a week as my company now demands, which increases my overall fuel demand. But I much prefer working 3 days a week in the office to being unemployed and not earning a salary, so I have to buy that gas. It's real demand even if I would prefer it not be.