It may be irrelevant to you, but it is not irrelevant to Head-Fi. To wit: Now, you might have me at "manufacturer representative", but it's not as cut-and-dry to me as it apparently is to everyone else.
And: what's the problem? The only problem I have is that he denies it. He has a relationship with them. Whether or not it is profitable to him is still a matter of conjecture at this point, but a relationship does exist. As to whether or not that makes him a member of the trade or a groupie is up to definition, and quite frankly, you're really cutting your definition a little too fine if someone merely having a relationship of some sort with someone else makes him a member of the trade -- sounds to me like you're just trying to state your definition in such a way as to make him a member of the trade.
Let me turn this around a little bit: what if someone who happened to live in the same city as someone else asked his help to move a warehouse full of tubes, but instead of offering to pay him, offered him something else (I'll deliberately leave that something else vague, since in a world of bartering, it often is left vague...but it's probably tubes). Does that person become a member of the trade? If it is an ongoing relationship? If it only happens the once? I don't know about you, but if I can't get into CES for free, then I'm not a member of the trade. Just helping someone out with a bunch of tubes isn't sufficient.
For example.