2012 is proving to be a very interesting year. As if it wasn't enough that The Bus Shop will be closing in March of this year, Holy Culture Download has just announced that they too will be closing their doors later this month.

Scheduled to dissolve on February 28th, Holy Culture Download originally began as 3Hmp3 and was the very first Christian download store. The store was the founded by Victor Padilla (Vic), who was also the founder of Holy Culture Radio at the time. He and his business partner with HCR, Anonymous, owned the store together as a partnership. Vic eventually sold his ownership of the store to James 'Trig" Rosseau (also co-owner of Holy Culture), and he and Anonymous remained the sole owners to this day. 

Here is the official statement from their site. After reading it, their reasoning for closing makes a lot of sense. 

Holy Culture exists to provide media for the general consumer; tools and resources for artists and serves as an advocate for the CHH genre.  At the end of the day our mission is to serve – - however, we acknowledge that how we do that will constantly evolve.  As we moved into 2012 and reviewed our strategy as to how we serve, we have decided we will close the holyculturedownload store at the end of February.

The store previously served to fill a gap for CHH – - helping make it available to consumers.  The good news is that gap no longer exists as over the past several years, as CHH has matured, the artists and labels have done a great job at ensuring their products are available at the large digital and physical outlets.  Exiting the store allows us to further invest into the other aspects of Holy Culture and we look forward to delivering more in 2012.

We want to thank everyone who has been a part of that phase of our journey.  It has been an honor and we look forward to continuing to serve you through our media other tools we have planned to deploy / enrich in 2012.