Music Genres Trivia
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100 free Music Genres trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every genre has an origin story that is better than its encyclopedia summary: a radio DJ who borrowed a slang word, a record-shop owner who needed a label for the imports, a journalist's sneer that the bands ended up adopting. The music itself is usually defined by one small decision, such as where the guitar chop lands, which drum carries the pulse, or which squeezebox an immigrant happened to bring on the boat. These 100 questions cover that ground across roughly 50 styles: the rhythmic signatures of disco, ska and rock and roll, the clubs and labels that built punk, grunge, British dance music and Northern soul, the coinages behind rockabilly, shoegaze and zydeco, and the defining sounds of tango, bhangra, fado, merengue and amapiano. Latin, African, South Asian and East Asian styles sit beside the Anglo-American canon, and each answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something you did not know. Play it to test how far your listening actually reaches, or print it for a music round at a quiz night.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Disco's defining drum pattern, a bass-drum thump on every beat of the bar, is known by what name?
Four-on-the-floor
Four-on-the-floor was not disco's invention: it was common in jazz drumming until bebop arrived in the 1940s, and the name refers to the drum kit's pedal-operated bass drum.
Q 02By one account the blues is named for 'the blue devils', an old English phrase meaning what?
Melancholy
Melancholy and sadness were 'the blue devils' in a 1798 George Colman farce of that title, decades before the music existed. The same phrase once described the hallucinations of alcohol withdrawal.
Q 03Which Cleveland disc jockey started calling the R&B he played 'rock and roll' on air in 1951?
Alan Freed
Alan Freed picked up a phrase that already existed as R&B slang for sex and made it the name of a genre; he is thought to have found it on 'Sixty Minute Man' by Billy Ward and his Dominoes.
Q 04Which Bowery club, opened by Hilly Kristal in 1973 as a roots-music bar, became New York punk's cradle?
CBGB
CBGB stood for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, the music Hilly Kristal meant to book, until the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and Blondie made 315 Bowery punk's home instead.
Q 05Which industrial English city produced Black Sabbath, whose guitarist lost fingertips at a factory?
Birmingham
Birmingham's Black Sabbath owe part of their heavy sound to that accident: unable to fret normally, Tony Iommi tuned his guitar down and leaned on power chords.
Q 06Alongside Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax, which band completes the 'Big Four' of US thrash metal?
Megadeth
Megadeth was formed in 1983 by Dave Mustaine after Metallica fired him as lead guitarist, which makes the 'Big Four' a family feud as much as a scene.
Q 07In the August 1995 'Battle of Britpop', Blur's 'Country House' outsold which Oasis single?
Roll with It
'Roll with It' sold 216,000 copies to 'Country House's 274,000 in the best week for UK singles sales in a decade, and Oasis had to settle for number two. Their album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? won the longer war.
Q 08Which Seattle label founded by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman sold the local sound as 'grunge'?
Sub Pop
Sub Pop sold Green River's Dry as a Bone in its mail-order catalogue as 'ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation', though the word had been used of rock music for decades.
Q 09Cumbia, now danced right across Latin America, began on the Caribbean coast of which country?
Colombia
Colombia's Caribbean coast is cumbia's cradle, where one tradition traces the dance to funeral rites. Its classic line-up is three drums and three flutes, including the gaita.
Q 10Bossa nova, the hushed samba offshoot of late-1950s Rio, has a name that literally means what?
New trend
New trend, or new wave, is the literal sense: 'bossa' was old Brazilian slang for doing something with special flair, and João Gilberto's guitar pared the samba beat down to match.
Q 11Early-1960s surf rock got its dripping 'wet' guitar tone from a spring reverb unit by which maker?
Fender
Fender's separate Reverb Unit of 1961 was the first 'wet' surf tone, meant to mimic crashing waves, and from 1963 the company built reverb into its amplifiers. It is the sound on Dick Dale's records.
Q 12Emo began in the mid-1980s as 'emotional hardcore', a softer turn in which US city's punk scene?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.'s hardcore scene produced Rites of Spring and Embrace, the bands credited with pioneering emo. The musicians themselves, by one account, bitterly detested the 'emo-core' tag.
Q 13Amapiano, South Africa's 2010s dance export, rides the booming bassline of which percussion sound?
Log drum
Q 21Juan Atkins borrowed the name for Detroit's machine music from which futurist's book The Third Wave?
Alvin Toffler
Alvin Toffler's writing supplied Atkins with 'techno' and also the names Cybotron and Metroplex, so the genre's vocabulary came from a futurist's bookshelf rather than from a club.
Q 22Trip hop, the slow, dub-heavy sound of Portishead and Tricky, emerged from which English port city?
Bristol
Bristol's sound-system DJs, steeped in Jamaican dub, favoured laid-back, heavy 'down tempo' beats, and when hip-hop seeped into that subculture in the late 1980s the result was trip hop. Its gloom owes something to post-punk too.
Q 23Which Michigan band behind '96 Tears' did critic Dave Marsh call 'punk rock' in Creem in 1971?
Log drum basslines carry a genre whose name is Zulu for 'pianos': the sound is a synthesised take on the wooden slit drum, laid under keys borrowed from deep house and kwaito.
Q 14Bhangra, the Punjabi harvest-dance music, is driven by which two-sided drum played with two sticks?
Dhol
The dhol once marked the spring Vaisakhi harvest in Punjab; with synthesizers and guitars added, its beat now anchors the music of the Punjabi diaspora from Britain to Canada.
Q 15Ska pairs a walking bass line with guitar or piano chops that land on which part of the beat?
The offbeat
The offbeat chop, known as the upstroke or skank, is what makes ska bounce; in 1950s Jamaica it grew out of copying American shuffle blues records played on sound systems. Horns usually take the lead over it.
Q 16What name is given to K-pop's method of housing and drilling would-be idols for years before they debut?
The trainee system
The trainee system was popularised by Lee Soo-man of SM Entertainment, who called his star-making method 'cultural technology' and had it written into a manual for staff to follow.
Q 17Which novelist's 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age helped pin that name on the speakeasy decade?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald did not coin 'Jazz Age', which was already in popular use before 1920, but his story collection fixed it as the name of the decade he went on to portray in The Great Gatsby.
Q 18Whose glittery 'Hot Love' on Top of the Pops in March 1971 is often cited as the start of glam rock?
Marc Bolan
Marc Bolan had led an acoustic psychedelic folk act, Tyrannosaurus Rex, before going electric; critic Ken Barnes called him 'the man who started it all', and 'Hot Love' was his first UK number one.
Q 19Which squeezebox, named by a German dealer and intended for church music, became the voice of tango?
Bandoneón
The bandoneón is named for Heinrich Band, who meant it for religious and popular music; emigrants and sailors are thought to have carried it to Argentina around 1870, where 25,000 arrived in 1930 alone.
Q 20Which group's 1969 B-side 'Amen, Brother' gave jungle and drum and bass their favourite drum break?
The Winstons
The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother' was the flip side of 'Color Him Father', and the band earned no royalties from one of the most sampled breaks ever; its leader only learned of the sampling in 1996.
? and the Mysterians
? and the Mysterians earned the phrase years before the Ramones had a record out, when Marsh praised their 'landmark exposition of punk rock' in May 1971. Lester Bangs had already called Iggy Pop 'that Stooge punk' in the same magazine.
Q 24Jerry Dammers founded 2 Tone Records, home of Britain's ska revival, in 1979 while in which band?
The Specials
The Specials' Dammers turned down a straight signing and got Chrysalis to fund up to 15 singles a year on his own label, whose mascot Walt Jabsco was named after an old American bowling shirt he owned.
Q 25Which Manchester band's funky 1989 single 'Fools Gold' was that year's biggest-selling indie single?
The Stone Roses
The Stone Roses took 'Fools Gold' to number 8 in November 1989, the same month as Happy Mondays' Madchester Rave On EP and 808 State's 'Pacific State', the moment the scene got its name. The band had thrown warehouse parties since 1985.
Q 26Northern soul's famous all-nighters ran from 1973 to 1981 at the Casino in which Lancashire town?
Wigan
Wigan Casino became the scene's flagship, alongside Blackpool Mecca's Highland Room and the Golden Torch in Stoke-on-Trent, for dancing to obscure 1960s American records. The name 'Northern soul' was coined in a London record shop.
Q 27Skiffle, the 1950s craze Lonnie Donegan set off, built a bass from a broom handle, string and what?
A tea chest
A tea chest with a broom handle and a single string stood in for the double bass, and that freedom from expensive instruments, after Lonnie Donegan's 1956 hit 'Rock Island Line', is what set off the craze.
Q 28Which keyboard, replaying tapes of strings and flutes, became a signature of 1970s progressive rock?
Mellotron
The Mellotron played a strip of pre-recorded tape for every key, giving King Crimson, Yes and Genesis an orchestra in a box, though it was designed for homes and clubs rather than for touring bands.
Q 29Which Austin band printed 'psychedelic rock' on its business cards in January 1966, the first known use of the term?
13th Floor Elevators
The 13th Floor Elevators put a third eye on the cards, and their open advocacy of LSD made them a police target, ending in singer Roky Erickson's 1969 arrest for drug possession.
Q 30Which 1967 film gave Flatt and Scruggs's bluegrass 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown' a worldwide audience?
Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde played the tune over its car chases, though Flatt and Scruggs recorded it in 1949, fifteen years after the real outlaws were shot dead.