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.

This weekend Bedingfield, who is in Los Angeles recording her second album, said the time was right for young British artists to follow Coldplay and make their mark in America. “The doors are open because young Americans realise that we make a soulful kind of music,” she said.

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.

At a time when Microsoft is facing criticism for failing to produce enough game machines to supply the shops, Gates has found a way to maintain demand while giving young musicians a faster route to fame than the traditional avenue of touring America.

British bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Editors are jostling to become Gates’s next favourite act.

According to Microsoft, Gates vets the contenders himself. “In a month as an artist in residence you can reach a lot of kids in a fresh and unprecedented way,” said one British rock manager.

Bedingfield is already a familiar figure in cyberspace: she was the voice of a sexy Bond girl in a game version of From Russia with Love.

For the next month Xbox 360 owners, including 70,000 in Britain, can download music videos and pop interviews and play online games against the husky-voiced blonde.

Bedingfield was born in Sussex and moved to Lewisham, south London, as a child. She also spent time with her parents’ Christian missionary family in New Zealand.

As a teenager she created a Christian rock band called the DNA Algorithm with her elder brother Daniel and younger sister Nikola. Its prospects faded when she went to the University of Greenwich to study psychology.

Daniel Bedingfield broke into the charts before his sister with Gotta Get Thru This, which he recorded in his bedroom. He enjoyed a string of hits until New Year’s Day, 2004, when he was badly injured in a car crash in New Zealand. It took him nearly a year to recover.

Initially known as “Daniel Bedingfield’s sister”, Natasha has written her own hits, including Single and These Words. The Bedingfields are the only brother and sister to have solo number one hits in Britain.

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