Music trivia has a habit of exposing people. Someone who claims they know everything about the 90s will nail the first eight questions and then fold on a chart record. Someone who has never bought an album in their life will quietly clean up on the classical round. That's the fun of it.
Here are 50 music trivia questions and answers, sorted so a group can start together and end up genuinely stuck. Every answer is checkable. A few of the chart facts are newer than what you'll find on most lists, so if someone at the table argues with you, they're probably working from an old number.
Warm-up (nobody gets left behind)
1. Which city were the Beatles from?
Answer: Liverpool.
2. Who was the lead singer of Queen?
Answer: Freddie Mercury.
3. How many strings does a standard guitar have?
Answer: Six.
4. Which instrument has 88 keys?
Answer: The piano.
5. Who is known as the King of Rock and Roll?
Answer: Elvis Presley.
6. What does DJ stand for?
Answer: Disc jockey.
7. Which Jamaican singer turned reggae into a global genre?
Answer: Bob Marley.
8. Which singer released the album 21 and the single Rolling in the Deep?
Answer: Adele.
9. Which country is ABBA from?
Answer: Sweden.
10. What do you call a group of four singers?
Answer: A quartet.
11. Bruce Springsteen answers to which two-word nickname?
Answer: The Boss.
12. What does a cappella mean?
Answer: Singing with no instruments behind it.
Pop and rock (the round most people think they'll win)
13. Which band recorded Hotel California?
Answer: The Eagles, in 1976.
14. What was the first music video ever played on MTV?
Answer: Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles, on August 1, 1981. On the nose, in hindsight.
15. Which Nirvana album opens with Smells Like Teen Spirit?
Answer: Nevermind, from 1991.
16. Which member of the Beatles was shot and killed in New York in 1980?
Answer: John Lennon.
17. What year did Prince release Purple Rain?
Answer: 1984.
18. Aretha Franklin made Respect famous, but who wrote and recorded it first?
Answer: Otis Redding.
19. Which band released The Dark Side of the Moon?
Answer: Pink Floyd, in 1973.
20. Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday around placeholder lyrics before the real ones existed. What were they?
Answer: Scrambled eggs. Same melody, worse song.
21. Which 1969 festival took place on a dairy farm in New York state?
Answer: Woodstock.
22. Whose 1979 single Rapper's Delight helped push hip hop onto mainstream radio?
Answer: The Sugarhill Gang.
23. Which act has the most No. 1 singles in Billboard Hot 100 history?
Answer: The Beatles, with 20.
24. Which Beatles album came out last, and which one did they record last?
Answer: Let It Be was released last, in 1970, but Abbey Road was the last album they actually recorded together. This one starts arguments.
Charts and awards (where the confident people get quiet)
25. What is the best-selling album of all time worldwide?
Answer: Michael Jackson's Thriller.
26. Which album holds the highest sales certification in the United States, then?
Answer: The Eagles' Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), at 38 million units. That's why you'll see two different answers floating around for the biggest album ever. One is a global figure, one is a US certification.
27. Which artist has won the most Grammy Awards?
Answer: Beyonce. She passed conductor Georg Solti in 2023 and now sits at 35.
28. Who won eight Grammys in a single night in 1984?
Answer: Michael Jackson, seven of them for Thriller.
29. What is the best-selling single of all time?
Answer: Bing Crosby's White Christmas, at an estimated 50 million-plus copies. Elton John's Candle in the Wind 1997 is the best seller of the modern chart era at around 33 million.
30. Which song has spent the most weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100?
Answer: Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You, with 22 weeks piled up across holiday seasons. For a single unbroken run, Old Town Road and A Bar Song (Tipsy) are tied at 19 weeks each. Most trivia lists still only know the second half of that answer.
31. Which song won ABBA the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest?
Answer: Waterloo.
32. What does a diamond certification represent in the US?
Answer: 10 million units.
33. Who directed the 14-minute Thriller video?
Answer: John Landis, who had just made An American Werewolf in London.
34. What does BPM stand for?
Answer: Beats per minute.
Classical and instruments (the sleeper round)
35. How many symphonies did Beethoven complete?
Answer: Nine.
36. Beethoven kept composing after losing what?
Answer: His hearing. He was profoundly deaf by the time he finished the Ninth.
37. Ode to Joy comes from which piece?
Answer: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
38. How old was Mozart when he died?
Answer: 35, in 1791.
39. Which composer wrote The Four Seasons?
Answer: Antonio Vivaldi.
40. What pitch does an orchestra usually tune to?
Answer: Concert A, normally set at 440 Hz.
41. The word piano is short for pianoforte. What does that literally mean?
Answer: Soft-loud. It was named for the thing harpsichords couldn't do.
42. Which instrument is played without the performer touching it?
Answer: The theremin. You move your hands through two electromagnetic fields.
43. How many strings does a violin have?
Answer: Four.
44. Which section of an orchestra has the most players?
Answer: The strings, usually by a wide margin.
Hard (this is the part people screenshot)
45. How many black keys are on a standard piano?
Answer: 36. The other 52 are white.
46. Which 1963 single triggered an FBI obscenity investigation that went nowhere?
Answer: Louie Louie by the Kingsmen. Investigators eventually concluded the lyrics were impossible to make out at any speed.
47. Saxophones are made of brass. Which instrument family do they belong to?
Answer: Woodwind. The sound comes from a reed, not the metal.
48. John Cage's 4'33" consists of what?
Answer: Silence. The performer plays nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, and the room noise becomes the piece.
49. What is the oldest surviving complete written melody?
Answer: The Hurrian Hymn, from the ancient city of Ugarit, roughly 3,400 years old.
50. How fast does a 7-inch single spin?
Answer: 45 rpm. An LP spins at 33 and a third.
Scoring it
Out of 50: over 40 and you should be captaining a team. 28 to 40 is a solid bar-trivia showing. Under 20 usually means you skipped the classical round, which is exactly how the classical round gets you.
If you want more sets like this, we have full rounds for movies, sports, and kids, plus a general easy-to-brutal general knowledge set. Running the night yourself? Start with our trivia night theme ideas and the host guide. And if the chart questions burned you, this is how you actually get better.
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