Music Trivia: 20 Facts to Ace Any Song Round

The music round is where quiz nights get loud. Everyone thinks they know their songs, but a few well-chosen facts about records, legends and instruments will put you ahead of the crowd. Here are 20 to hum along to.

Chart Records

1. The Beatles have the most number-one hits on the US Billboard Hot 100 — 20 in total.
2. Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982) is widely cited as the best-selling album of all time.
3. Elvis Presley is known as the "King of Rock and Roll" for reshaping popular music in the 1950s.
4. "Happy Birthday to You" is one of the most recognised songs in the English language. Its melody came from a 19th-century song, "Good Morning to All".
5. Vinyl made a comeback. In the 2020s, vinyl records outsold CDs in the United States for the first time since the 1980s.

Bands and Legends

6. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975) has no chorus and moves through ballad, opera and hard rock sections. Record executives thought it was too long for radio.
7. ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with "Waterloo", launching them to worldwide fame.
8. Bob Marley brought reggae from Jamaica to a global audience.
9. The "27 Club" refers to famous musicians who died at 27, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
10. Woodstock (1969) drew hundreds of thousands of people to a farm in New York State, and Live Aid (1985) raised money for famine relief with concerts in London and Philadelphia.

Classical Music

11. Beethoven continued composing after losing his hearing. He was almost completely deaf when he wrote his Ninth Symphony.
12. Mozart was composing by the age of five and wrote more than 600 works before dying at 35.
13. Johann Sebastian Bach had 20 children, several of whom became composers.
14. Vivaldi's The Four Seasons is a set of four violin concertos, one for each season.

Instruments and Sound

15. A standard piano has 88 keys — 52 white and 36 black.
16. The string section of an orchestra is made up of violins, violas, cellos and double basses.
17. The theremin is played without being touched. Invented by Léon Theremin around 1920, it is controlled by moving your hands near two antennas.
18. A standard guitar has six strings, usually tuned E, A, D, G, B, E from lowest to highest.
19. "A cappella" means singing without instruments. It comes from Italian for "in the manner of the chapel".
20. Middle C sits near the centre of the piano keyboard and is a common reference note.

Musical Terms Worth Knowing

Many music questions test vocabulary, and most of it is Italian, because Italian composers shaped how music was written down:

• Allegro — fast and lively; adagio — slow; andante — at a walking pace.
• Forte — loud; piano — soft. The piano's full name, pianoforte, means "soft-loud", because it could play both.
• Crescendo — gradually getting louder.
• Octave — the gap between one note and the next note of the same name, eight white keys apart on a piano.

Eurovision Extras

The Eurovision Song Contest began in 1956 and is one of the longest-running television music competitions in the world. Ireland and Sweden have each won it seven times — a classic quiz question.

How Music Questions Are Asked

• Artist to song — the most common type.
• Records — best-selling albums, most number ones, longest-running hits.
• Band members — who was the drummer, who sang lead.
• Instruments and terms — tempo markings like allegro (fast) and adagio (slow).

Train Your Ear

Music trivia is one of the most enjoyable subjects to study, because you can listen while you learn. Make a playlist of classic songs from each decade and read about the artist as each track plays. Within a few weeks you will place songs by era and style almost instantly.

Learn a handful of these and the music round becomes your favourite. Ready to test your ear? Jump into the free Music quiz and see how high you can score.