Lack of coercion is not even on the map, and of course that one's blatantly ideological.

Two things in the real world have always defined a free market: Competition and the free flow of information. Those two principles are so central to free market principles that violations of them are generally, but not always, considered criminal acts; but absence of either one "breaks" a market.

I covered lack of competition due to copyright laws in another post. It's a misleading red herring to point to the existence of multiple "studios" as amounting to competition, because copyright grants a monopoly on each work. There is no competition to sell you a copy of the movie "Avatar" or any other; there is only one vendor of "Avatar".

You yourself illustrated the absence of the free flow of information when you described the marketplace as consisting only of sellers and their middlemen. When there's competition there's also rich feedback to the community of sellers telling them what buyers want and what price they'll pay. But when there's no competition, the feedback channel constricts to pretty much a binary "it's selling/it's not selling". And people who are doing well managing a portfolio of monopoly rights are really not going to pay much attention to what consumers want.

Sellers don't really benefit from freezing out consumers, in the long run, because among other drawbacks, they lose valuable information from the marketplace. I think that the role of a market as an information clearinghouse can't possibly be understated. Without information flowing freely in a market about the market, everybody makes bad decisions.

How in the world is all this science fictiony? Best I can come up with is this visualization that I think of as The Apotheosis of Consumerism:

(from that great work of extrapolative fiction, "Wall-E") That's where we'll all end up if we don't renounce the dependency fostered by consumerism.