Machine music

It’s usually the lottery winner who is surprised at winning the jackpot. In Norway, lottery operator Norsk Tipping was as surprised by the draw on 27 June.

Norsk Tipping informed 47,000 bettors they had each won substantial prizes in the Eurojackpot draw. But it turns out the prizes had been wrongly calculated.

Norsk Tipping receives the prize amounts from Germany in euros and then converts them to Norwegian kroner, according to BBC.

An error in the conversion from euro cents to Norwegian kroner caused the prize amounts to be “excessively high,” the company said. The amounts were multiplied by 100 instead of being divided by 100, BBC said.

The firm’s CEO Tonje Sagstuen resigned on 28 June. On 30 June, the lottery operator texted apologies for the error to all the winners, who actually won much smaller amounts and not the millions they were initially told they had won.

Meanwhile, the new 1960s-inspired rock ‘n roll band, the Velvet Sundown, shot to online fame when the number of listeners of its debut album, “Floating on Echoes,” reached one million on Spotify a month after its release on 5 June, New York Post (NYP) reports.

The most popular song on the album, pro-peace folk rock song “Dust on the Wind,” clinched the No. 1 spot in Spotify’s daily “Viral 50” chart in Britain, Norway and Sweden between 29 June and 1 July, according to NYP.

Images of the band on the music platform and Instagram showed four guys.

Spotify’s description of the band read: “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”

The microblogging platform X’s description read: “All characters, stories, music, voices, and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments.

All that time, the one million listeners following the Velvet Sundown were grooving to songs sung by fake musicians created by AI.