Song Records, Awards & Festivals Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the accounting rule, adopted by the American and British certification bodies in the 2010s, that treats a set number of song streams, in the region of 1,500, as equivalent to one sale when deciding whether a record has gone gold, platinum or diamond?

Question 2

What is the name for the awards run by the Country Music Association from Nashville since 1967, whose top prize is Entertainer of the Year and which are regarded as country music's most important night?

Question 3

What is the name for the annual award, running since 1992, given for the best album of the year from the United Kingdom and Ireland, chosen by a small panel from a shortlist of twelve and carrying a fairly modest cash sum?

Question 4

What are the names for the trade bodies, one American and one British, that run the gold, platinum and diamond sales certification schemes in their countries and publish the framed award discs handed to artists?

Question 5

What is the name for Canada's national music awards, presented since 1970, whose name began as a joke on that of the broadcasting regulator's chairman and was then formally adopted, complete with an invented Roman goddess to justify it?

Question 6

What is the name for the American award, given since 1943 for a distinguished composition by an American, that was for decades the near-exclusive preserve of academic modernists before a jazz work by Wynton Marsalis won it in 1997 and a rap album by Kendrick Lamar in 2018?

Question 7

What is the name for the British record industry's annual awards, held since the late 1970s, with a statuette redesigned by a different artist most years and a history of live-television mishaps?

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About Song Records, Awards & Festivals

This quiz is the business end of music: the prizes, the chart and sales records, the great festivals and the scandals around them. Each of the eighty questions describes an award, a record for sales or chart performance, a festival, an industry term or a famous incident, and asks you to name it from four options, then explains the story behind it. It is the final quiz of the Music category and deliberately avoids ground the earlier ones covered, such as Live Aid, Woodstock, the Billboard Hot 100 as a topic in itself, the Tony Awards and the Proms.

The first pack is the headline material: the Grammy Awards and the confusing difference between Record, Song and Album of the Year; Best New Artist and its curse; the Eurovision Song Contest; the Oscar for Best Original Song; the MTV Video Music Awards; the festivals Glastonbury, Coachella, Lollapalooza and the Isle of Wight; the record-breaking album Thriller and the most-covered song Yesterday; gold and platinum discs; the British Christmas number one; the Mercury Prize and the BRIT Awards; the best-selling single White Christmas; and the Concert for Bangladesh.

The second pack widens out to the Kennedy Center Honors, the Ivor Novello and Polar prizes, the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and the country, Canadian, Latin and BET awards; chart records for the most number ones, the longest chart runs, the most streams and the biggest YouTube numbers; the copyright fight over Happy Birthday and the origins of two national anthems; the festivals Roskilde, Montreux, Reading and Leeds, Tomorrowland, Rock in Rio, Farm Aid, South by Southwest, Fuji Rock, Sziget and Download; and the machinery of royalties, performing-rights bodies, streaming certification, the Apollo Amateur Night and the Las Vegas residency.

The third pack is infamy and oddity: scoring nul points at Eurovision; the unverifiable race to claim the world's biggest concert; the Love Parade and Roskilde crowd disasters; the 2004 Super Bowl halftime incident; the country-radio boycott of the Dixie Chicks; Terry Wogan's Eurovision commentary; Despacito and the streaming era; the most Grammys ever won; the Song of the Summer; the Fyre Festival; the shifting format of the single; the 2021 Grammy voting reform; the first rock bootleg; the Glastonbury superfence and fallow year; the Eurovision hosting rule and Big Five; the record of Black artists in the top Grammy category; and the Sanremo song Volare.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, an award beside awards, a festival beside festivals, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Images are used only where they cannot give the answer away: a generic festival-crowd photo, a turntable or a mixing desk appears on a question whose four options are all the same sort of thing, so the picture fits every one equally. Facts and figures have been checked, and the many unverifiable claims in this corner of music, crowd sizes above all, are flagged as such.