He Liked Shopping Here So Much He Became An Employee!

Our own Don Poe, proudly wearing his EAR/Rational t-shirt, posing with the Boulder Creek Festival duck, while an unidentified woman expresses her disapproval by refusing to look at them.


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Don has a day job as a video editor/videographer/DVD author, and does freelance video work on the side, but only really feels at home when he's working for us. When you end up purchasing something really obscure through us, thank Don because he's the one who goes out and finds this stuff!

Pay us in Euro or Pounds Sterling!

When we buy direct from labels and distributors in the Europe and the United Kingdom, we often pay in Euro or Pounds Sterling. PayPal lets you maintain separate balances for each currency, so we've modified our checkout page so that your order total is displayed in Euro and Pounds Sterling as well as US Dollars. If you are using PayPal you may pay for your order in either of these currencies if you wish. By paying in your native currency you avoid PayPal's exchange rate, and we avoid a conversion fee upon receipt.

Eventually, if we end up with a surplus of either currency, we'll have to pay to convert it to US Dollars or some other currency, but we'll shoulder that cost for now.

Where Have You Gone, Arthur Russell? (A nation turns its lonely eyes to you...)

Sometimes the best part of running this business involves no money or products changing hands. In early December I received an order for six copies of Arthur Russell's "World of Echo" DVD+CD. (If you don't know who Arthur Russell was--or even if you do--there is an excellent site dedicated to him here.)

We rarely receive orders for two copies of an item, let alone six, which is pretty much unheard of. So I looked closely at the order and there was a note which said "Arthur Russell is our son. We understand that this box set is scarce and would like some for our friends and ourself."

Upon reading the note I was quite saddened. As a parent myself I can't imagine outliving my children, and I was a bit dismayed that Arthur's folks didn't have copies of this limited reissue.

We had sold a number of these sets and I was pretty sure we could not get more copies. I contacted my sales rep who verified that they were indeed no longer available. I then contacted Audika Records, who released the reissue and told them that Arthur's folks were looking for copies. Thankfully, they took it from there, and were able to get copies to Arthur's folks. I received a nice email from Arthur's father thanking me for my help and it felt pretty darned good...

Drop Ship Your Trades

One of our customers orders FAX CDs and routinely has them shipped to different people/addresses. Turns out he is doing trades with these people, so I offered to send the orders without an invoice, and list his address as the return address instead of ours. This process is called "drop shipping," and it's quite common in this and other businesses. It's quite easy for us to do that as we are using a computer-based postage printing system, and I simply entered this customer as one of the possible return addresses. We exist to sell music, and we're more than willing to be creative about how we do it!

It's possibly of limited value to many of you because we don't tend to keep most things in stock and it will only work well for you to set up a trade for something we have in stock (e.g., FAX CDs), but I thought it was worth mentioning so you know you have that option.

If you're interested in having us do this for you, just indicate in the comments section of your order that you'd like it drop shipped and we'll take it from there.

Oído/Racional!

Ed Roda, a longtime customer of ours, sent me this picture of himself proudly wearing his EAR/Rational t-shirt at Parque Nacional Iguazú in Argentina. If anyone else has photos of EAR/Rational t-shirts in distant, interesting, or famous locations, please send them!



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