It’s a market thing. A few are willing to pay more and not everyone has to pay. As soon as everyone has to pay the price becomes very important and it should be reasonable for the content. If a podcast that takes 40 man hours a month to produce and has 10,000 listeners and charged $1 per episode... idk it doesn’t add up to me.
Why does it matter if everyone has to pay the price or not? Why does it matter to an individual consumer how many people pay for the podcast episode? The consumer's choice is about paying $1 for the episode in hopes that they will receive value from the episode such that they consider it to have been worth the $1.