This came to me on Peter Spellman's Music Business Insight e-newsletter - and while we often bemoan the "secular market" for chant, remember that it's harder to ask people to love what they've never heard.

O BROTHERS, WHERE ART THOU?

Their roster includes the five-Grammy-award-winning singer Amy Winehouse and the rapper Eminem, but now Universal Records is on the lookout for a different kind of musical star - a group of singing monks.
The label has placed adverts in several religious newspapers asking for talented monks to audition for an album of Gregorian chant, the mesmeric sacred song that is believed to have originated in the 10th century. According to the label, the music's popularity has exploded with the success of the plainchant soundtrack to the computer game Halo, which has sold more than 16m copies worldwide.

"We want people that are genuine, who can sing it as it should be sung," says Dickon Stainer, director of Universal Classics. "It's going to be a challenge. You can't open the Yellow Pages and call a monastery."

Source: Francesca Martin, The Guardian (March, 2008)