Song Records, Awards & Festivals Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which 1958 Italian song, properly titled Nel blu dipinto di blu, emerged from the Sanremo festival, went on to top the American chart for weeks, and won the very first Grammy Awards for both Record and Song of the Year?

Question 2

Which national anthem, that of the Netherlands, has a melody dating from around 1570, making it generally accepted as the oldest national anthem tune in the world, even though it was not formally adopted until 1932?

Question 3

Which English festival, held on a working dairy farm in Somerset and started in 1970 by the farmer Michael Eavis, is built around a stage shaped like a pyramid, is notorious for deep mud, and takes an occasional year off to let the land recover?

Question 4

What is the name for the Harlem talent contest, running since 1934, in which the audience's booing is as decisive as its applause, a comic figure sweeps failing acts off the stage, and hopefuls rub a section of tree trunk backstage for luck?

Question 5

Which 2012 song and video by the South Korean performer Psy, built around a horse-riding dance, became the first video ever to reach one billion views on YouTube and then the first to pass the limit of the site's original view counter?

Question 6

What is the name for the highest single sales certification given by the American recording industry association, awarded when a release passes ten million units, a level only a few dozen albums have reached?

Question 7

What is the informal name for the jump in sales and attention that a relatively unknown album can enjoy simply by being named on the twelve-strong shortlist for the British and Irish album-of-the-year prize, even if it does not go on to win?

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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.