Natasha Bedingfiled is XBox's first musician in residence

IN the video that accompanies her first international hit, Unwritten, the British singer-songwriter Natasha Bedingfield is trapped inside a book trying to escape from a musty library. Unwritten’s startling imagery and catchy tune so impressed Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, that he has appointed Bedingfield his first corporate “artist in residence”. To launch her role at Microsoft, which requires her to produce music and video for its Xbox 360 game machine, the 24-year-old Londoner played a concert in New York last week that was watched over the internet by up to 1m Xbox owners around the world. Unwritten immediately rose to number six in the American singles chart, just behind You’re Beautiful by James Blunt, and became the most-played record on US radio by a British woman since Kim Wilde’s Kids in America in 1982. Bedingfield’s chart success marks a spectacular start to Gates’s programme. He will pick one rising star each month as artist in residence on the Xbox 360, which was launched in Britain four months ago. [Blink]