At their official website, Gaia Epicus outline their experiece with Sound Riot Records. Numerous follow up e-mails from other bands outling their experiences with the label are also published on the site. Below is an excerpt:

Have you received a record contract from this label ? Read this before you sign...

Every band as far as our discovery shows have been run over by this label. And they owe bands and others alot of money!

Bands have been kicked from their contracts for no reason, or maybe for not selling enough albums. But how can people buy their albums when a label isn't doing any Promotion? oh sure they will say that they do, but if you call a few small ad's in a few magazines promotion then maybe they are right? haha By the way, they have told some "people" that they sometimes sign a band just to release an extra album and then just fire them from the contract...

Don't expect to receive any sales statements, but if your lucky you might get a little paper with some small numbers they have made up them selves. But usually it takes them about 1-2 years to do this...

Every band have received this mail "Sorry for the our silence but..." many times, and one of the reasons every band have received is "Sorry but our computer did crash, and all data was lost". How many times is normal for this to happen? Just another stupid act from this label, who has the world record in stupid excuses...

Here is some info about what we in Gaia Epicus knows about them, and also what other bands who have been signed to this label have told us...

Gaia Epicus 2002, we signed a contract with Sound Riot Records from Portugal. We where very happy to get our first record deal, and it all looked pretty good back then. I guess we should have done more background searching of the label before signing that contract. We signed for 2 albums and had a pretty okay deal, but it turned out that this contract wasn't something this label would take to seriously.

It all worked pretty okay until we had released our first album "Satrap" in may of 2003. After that we started to notice that things wasn't right. All communication where done by email and normal post mail. We have never seen/met these 2 brothers (Gilson Rodrigues and Louis Rodrigues) or spoken to them by phone.

It took longer and longer time between each email, and every time we had a question we could receive a email after a few weeks saying "we will answer you tomorrow, or next week" but as always it takes longer than what they say. And they could also state in a email "We don't have time to answer you right now" but then we could receive other long emails about new reviews and other stuff. How can they have time to write this but not answer our questions?

When it was time for some royalty payments for our first album we started to know that things was not right. And at this time we also started to contact other bands to hear how their work with the label was. And it became more and more clear to me that these where people who didn't give a fuck about their bands and contracts. As time passed and we didn't receive any payment i discovered more and more facts about how they have run over each and every band they have worked with.

Now 2 years and 8 months after the release of our debut album "Satrap" we have only received 2 small payments for sold cd's. At the moment we are waiting to be paid our first time for our second release "Symphony" but i guess that will not happen.

Back to the story... Close to the summer of 2004 we agreed to start recording of our second album, and that would be released in the fall of 2004. We had a small delay because the studio we where to use had to move, so we had to find another studio to use. We finally started to record the album and everything went really good and fast, but then we had some problems. Cause our label didn't pay the money in time. We almost had to delete half of the album right there, but thanks to a great Studio owner that didn't happen. He was kind to give the label another chance to pay the money, even though the label told us they had used our studio money for private use...

The studio got paid and a release date for the album was set to march 2005. 3 days before I could read on a webpage that our track list was changed from what we wanted it to be. (not the first time i had to find out through webpages some news about Gaia Epicus released by our label before telling us. I also had to find out release dates for both our albums this way, and not by the label telling us this first.) I thought that the webpage had done a mistake, but I soon found out it was the label who had done this because they had spoken to a few metal reviewers and together found out that it would be more professional to have the track list their way. Hahahaha how can you state something like that? They also said that it would be better for the Japanese market, cause with our track list order we would not get a distribution in Japan. The truth would be "No one in Japan wants to work with this label anymore" and there is many other distro's that feels the same way. The label have lost many deals because of their bad ways to work, and will loose more as they continue to screw other people/bands and so on...

After many months and having legal advisors in the picture we had to agree on releasing the album on Sound Riot if the album was to be released. We signed a new contract and this was actually a better deal than what we had from before, and the label had to give us all our demands. We wanted to just end the co-operation and release the album on a different label, but sadly we couldn't do that. But from 2009 we can :) then we will owe all rights to our both albums, and if the label do a little contract breach before that we will owe the rights right away. So good for us but bad for them. Haha

The sales numbers we have been given have been wrong, and i know this because i have checked it out my self by contacting some people. Take the numbers we just received for our 2'nd release "Symphony of glory" 325 copies sold from July to January. And they didn't put in the sales from March to july when the wrong version of the album got in sale in the US. When asked about this they told me that those numbers was included and it only got sold 2-3 copies from this version. Lies! lies! lies! I know for a fact it's been sold many more, cause i have been in contact with a store telling me the sold over 20 copies of this album in just 2 weeks time. When i asked the label about this they told me that some stores import cd's from Europe. Okay! that's strange since they told me the album only got in sale in the US. When asked about this they told me again that the album did only get in sale in the US. They talk around them self's so much I don't think they know what they are saying and have said before at all. I then asked to receive detailed numbers from each distro, but then they reply "we have to check first, and this will take a few days". What??? How the hell can they send me a sales statement if they don't know these numbers already? Lies, lies, lies...

And then they have the nerve to blame Century Media US for not being able to give info about how many cd's that have been sold. They say "Century Media is a big company with many workers so it's not easy for them to know what's going on" Hahaha is it possible? I believe that Century Media has full control over how many cd's that have been sold any time you ask them. They are a big a respected company unlike some others...

To read more from Gaia Epicus and from other bands, visit the Gaia Epicus website.