Zune dancing to a different drum machine

updated 6:20 p.m. ET Nov. 17, 2008

SEATTLE - A video for the title track on hip-hop veteran Common's forthcoming album, "Universal Mind Control," begins with a digital music player pulsing to the beat. The viewer is pulled through the screen into the gadget's guts, where the cool, collected rapper lets loose an easy stream of lyrics.

It takes hitting rewind a few times to notice that the music player isn't one of Apple's slim new iPods. It's a Zune, and it's made by Microsoft Corp.

Since it first landed two years ago, the Zune has been the butt of many jokes, like how its wireless music sharing feature would be great, if only a second person would buy one. But while Apple Inc. has counted on the sex appeal of its ever-thinner devices to keep consumers turned on, the Zune team has been beefing up its software and courting artists like Common, a dashing MC with mainstream appeal who might just help make Zune — dare we say it? — cool.

The relationship between Zune and Common began last summer, when the rapper performed a set at a Microsoft-organized concert in Los Angeles. Zune sponsored Common's latest tour and is kicking in posters, T-shirts and other materials to promote the new album, though Microsoft says it didn't pay extra to place a Zune in Common's music video. Now, the Chicago rapper on Monday became the latest face in Zune's national TV ad campaign. Neither side disclosed financial terms.

(Msnbc.com is a joint-venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

In an interview, Common described Zune as "progressive, fresh, innovative," a far cry from critics' refrain that it's an also-ran in a race iPod has already won. When he's pressed to explain, it becomes clear that Common is hooked less on the device than the way the Zune's software makes connections between artists, turning up new sounds for him to explore.

In the Zune program that runs on desktop computers — which functions as a user's music library and a music store, much like Apple's iTunes — clicking "mixview" brings up a collage of musicians or bands related somehow to the one the user was listening to. Clicking any of those new faces shuffles the six-degrees-of-separation-style interface to show a new round of photos of the artist's influences or proteges, similar-sounding singers and other related groups.

In the TV ad, Zune pairs Common with one of his biggest influences, Afrika Bambaataa. The two men trade lines about music and personal style from their places in a moving collage much like the "mixview" screen.

"It is digging in the (recored collections) the way we used to do as musicians and DJs," Common said in the interview. "Being music lovers, we would go to music lovers to try to discover music."

The serendipity enabled by the software is a point Microsoft has been trying to get across. Zune's latest campaign, said Chris Stephenson, a marketing general manager for the company, stresses that "mixview" is designed to be "a reason to download the software. From there, everything else should flow," including subscriptions to the ZunePass all-you-can-listen music service and, eventually, more Zune sales.

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