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50 free Music Festivals trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Music festivals are where pop history gets made in a single weekend: a farmer's field that became a national institution, a benefit show that a billion people watched, a dance party in a Belgian town that now sells out in hours. Every festival has a founding story, a site with an owner, and a set everyone who was there still talks about. These 50 questions roam from the 1960s to the 2020s and across five continents. They cover the founders and the farms, first editions and record crowds, the headliners who made history and the traditions and ticket rules that grew up around them. It suits pub-quiz regulars, festival veterans and anyone who has ever queued for a portaloo at dawn. Every answer comes with a short explanation and a source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which dairy farmer hosted the first Glastonbury festival on his Worthy Farm in 1970, charging £1 a ticket?
Michael Eavis
Michael Eavis was moved to host it after seeing Led Zeppelin at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues; the Kinks dropped out as headliners and Tyrannosaurus Rex topped the bill instead.
Q 02Whose 21-minute Wembley set at Live Aid was voted rock's greatest live performance in a 2005 industry poll?
Queen
Queen opened with a shortened 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and closed with 'We Are the Champions', a six-song set the BBC's David Hepworth called the greatest display of community singing the old stadium had seen.
Q 03Where did Oasis play to 125,000 people a night in August 1996, after 2.5 million applied for tickets?
Knebworth House
Knebworth House's two nights drew 2.5 million applications for 250,000 tickets, enough for 20 sold-out shows, and were then the biggest outdoor concerts the UK had seen.
Q 04Italy's Sanremo Music Festival, held since 1951, was the model for which international competition launched in 1956?
Eurovision Song Contest
The Eurovision Song Contest has run every year since 1956 except 2020, making it the longest-running international music competition on television; its first edition was staged in Lugano.
Q 05South by Southwest co-founder Louis Black named the Austin event as a play on which 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film?
North by Northwest
North by Northwest lent its name when SXSW launched in 1987 as a music conference run by Austin Chronicle staff; the film and interactive strands were bolted on later.
Q 06Which rapper headlined Glastonbury in 2019 wearing a Union Jack stab-proof vest designed by Banksy?
Stormzy
Stormzy's set made him the first black British rapper to headline Glastonbury, in the same year 'Vossi Bop' gave him his first UK number-one single.
Q 07Which city has hosted the free Donauinselfest, a three-day party on a Danube island, since 1984?
Vienna
Vienna's festival has claimed crowds of around three million and bills itself as the world's largest open-air music festival, with 11 stages strung along 4.5 km of the island and the city's Social Democrats as host.
Q 08Which Milwaukee festival, first held in 1968, did Guinness World Records certify in 1999 as the world's largest?
Summerfest
Summerfest fills Henry Maier Festival Park beside Lake Michigan, yet its inaugural 1968 edition was scattered across 35 sites and included a film festival and an air show.
Q 09Which prime minister's granddaughter Arabella co-organised the free 1971 Glastonbury Fayre?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill's granddaughter shunned interviews, yet the children's area she went on to organise at the festival became the seed of the charity Children's World.
Q 10Whose claim that hip-hop was wrong for Glastonbury led Jay-Z to open his 2008 headline set with 'Wonderwall'?
Noel Gallagher
Noel Gallagher's criticism got a tongue-in-cheek answer: Jay-Z, the first major hip-hop act to headline the festival, walked on strumming the Oasis anthem before his own set.
Q 11Who closed Glastonbury 2011 on the Sunday night, becoming the first woman to headline the festival since 1999?
Beyoncé
Beyoncé followed U2 and Coldplay on a bill whose tickets had sold out within four hours in October 2010, and the festival then took the next year off.
Q 12Which 2005 concert series, timed to the G8 summit at Gleneagles, reunited Pink Floyd's classic line-up after 24 years?
Live 8
Live 8 fell on the 20th anniversary of Live Aid, and the reunion was the last time Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason played together.
Q 13Which benefit did Willie Nelson launch in Champaign, Illinois in September 1985 after a Bob Dylan remark at Live Aid?
Farm Aid
Q 21Which Canadian city hosts the jazz festival that Guinness World Records certified in 2004 as the world's largest?
Montreal
Montreal's first edition in 1980 drew 12,000 people for Ray Charles, Chick Corea and Gary Burton, and the Guinness title followed in 2004.
Q 22Creamfields, the dance festival first held in Winchester in 1998, grew out of a superclub in which English city?
Liverpool
Liverpool's Cream nightclub ran it, moving the event to the city's old airport in 1999 before settling on the Daresbury estate in Cheshire.
Q 23Which lager sponsor gave Scotland's T in the Park Festival, held annually from 1994 to 2016, the T in its name?
Tennent's
Farm Aid drew 80,000 to Memorial Stadium and has run nearly every year since, after Dylan suggested from the Live Aid stage that some money should go to American family farmers.
Q 14Lollapalooza gave up touring in 2005 to become a destination festival in which Chicago lakefront space?
Grant Park
Grant Park's 2005 relaunch offered 70 acts on five stages, more variety than the travelling festival Perry Farrell started in 1991 ever managed.
Q 15Which capital hosts Sziget, the week-long island festival that began in 1993 as a student event?
Budapest
Budapest's 'Island of Freedom' started as Diáksziget (Student Island), ran so far over budget that the losses took until 1997 to repay, and spent 1996–2001 as Pepsi Sziget.
Q 16Rock am Ring, founded by promoter Marek Lieberberg in 1985, takes its name from which German motor-racing circuit?
Nürburgring
The Nürburgring's paddock in the Eifel hills hosts it, while twin Rock im Park runs the same weekend 200 miles away on Nuremberg's Zeppelinfeld with a near-identical line-up.
Q 17Which Indian state hosted the first Sunburn dance festival on one of its beaches in December 2007?
Goa
Goa's beach-party scene of the 1990s fed straight into Sunburn, which shifted to Pune in Maharashtra in 2016 before returning to Vagator in 2019.
Q 18Lollapalooza's first edition outside the United States was staged in April 2011 in which South American capital?
Santiago
Santiago's O'Higgins Park hosted it, and the success spawned Lollapalooza Brazil at São Paulo's Jockey Club a year later.
Q 19Vive Latino, the Ibero-American rock festival held almost every year since 1998, takes over which capital?
Mexico City
Mexico City has hosted Vive Latino since 1998, skipping only 1999, 2002 and the pandemic year of 2021, and sponsorship has since branded it Amazon Vive Latino.
Q 20Which Australian festival debuted in Sydney in 1992 with Nirvana supporting headliners the Violent Femmes?
Big Day Out
Big Day Out was founded by promoters Ken West and Vivian Lees at the Hordern Pavilion, and grew from that one-city show into an annual touring festival across Australia.
Tennent's backed founders Stuart Clumpas and Geoff Ellis of DF Concerts, and the festival started out at Strathclyde Park in Lanarkshire before moving on.
Q 24Which English racing circuit hosted Monsters of Rock from 1980 and has been home to Download since 2003?
Donington Park
Donington Park's Download took a name that was then a dirty word in an industry fighting file-sharing, while Monsters of Rock began there as the last date of a 1980 Rainbow tour.
Q 25Reading Festival gained a twin site in 1999, sharing its bill with which northern English city?
Leeds
Leeds took the second leg because demand kept rising, and the twin later moved to Bramham Park; Reading itself began life in 1961 as the National Jazz Festival at Richmond.
Q 26Which skate-shoe brand became title sponsor of Kevin Lyman's Warped Tour after its first run in 1995?
Vans
Vans stayed attached until the 2018 edition that Lyman billed as the final full cross-country run, with only three 25th-anniversary events following in 2019.
Q 27Which magazine's 25th-anniversary party in 1995 became an annual New Orleans festival of Black music and culture?
Essence
Essence meant it as a one-off, but 142,000 turned up that first July and the organisers made it an annual fixture that by the 2020s was reported to draw 500,000 people a day.
Q 28Tomorrowland's short-lived US spin-off TomorrowWorld ran from 2013 to 2015 near which city?
Atlanta
Atlanta's edition lasted three years before the experiment ended, while the Belgian original, dreamed up by brothers Manu and Michiel Beers in 2004, kept growing.
Q 29Electric Daisy Carnival, begun by Insomniac in Los Angeles in 1997, moved its flagship in 2011 to which Nevada venue?
Las Vegas Motor Speedway
Las Vegas Motor Speedway hosts the flagship each May; a record 525,000 people attended over three nights in 2023, making it the largest electronic dance festival in the world.
Q 30Which small Somerset village, not the town of Glastonbury itself, actually borders the festival's Worthy Farm site?
Pilton
Pilton and neighbouring Pylle flank the farm, and the nearest town is actually Shepton Mallet, three miles to the north-east.