Music Trivia for Kids
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
This music trivia for kids quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the music children meet at school and at home: how many keys a piano has, which family the trumpet belongs to, what a conductor does, why the recorder is plastic, and what a metronome is for. Then it moves to the songs and singers kids know: Baby Shark, Let It Go, Happy Birthday, We Don't Talk About Bruno, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Bruno Mars, BTS, Sabrina Carpenter, KPop Demon Hunters, the Beatles, Michael Jackson's Thriller and the Super Mario theme. Every question is answerable by kids aged about 7 to 13, and older kids and parents will find a few harder ones about clefs, composers and chart records. It works for a music class warm-up, a car ride or a family quiz night. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's article on the instrument, artist or song, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many keys does a piano have?
88
88, made up of 52 white keys and 36 black ones. Pressing any of them flicks a felt-covered hammer against the strings inside, so a piano is really a box of strings that you play by hitting them.
Q 02How many strings does a normal guitar have?
Six
Six. For centuries guitars had only four or five pairs of strings; the sixth was added in the late 1700s, around the time the pairs gave way to single strings.
Q 03Which is the smallest and highest-sounding instrument in the orchestra's string family?
The violin
The violin. Folk players call it a fiddle, yet it is usually the very same instrument: only the style of music changes the name.
Q 04Which is the biggest and lowest-sounding string instrument in an orchestra?
The double bass
The double bass. Orchestra players mostly stroke its thick strings with a bow, but in a jazz band it is almost always plucked with the fingers instead.
Q 05Which drum in a drum kit does the drummer play with a foot pedal?
The bass drum
The bass drum. Stepping on the pedal swings a stick into the big drum on the floor, so the drummer's hands stay free to play everything else.
Q 06The trumpet belongs to which family of instruments?
Brass
Brass. The sound starts with the player's own lips, which buzz against the cup-shaped mouthpiece; the metal tube only turns that buzz into a bright note.
Q 07The flute belongs to which family of instruments?
Woodwind
Woodwind. A flute still counts even when it is made of silver, because the family is defined by how the sound is made, by blowing across a hole or past a reed, not by what the tube is made of.
Q 08What is the person who stands in front of an orchestra and waves a stick called?
A conductor
A conductor. The stick is called a baton, and it caught on because players at the back could see it more easily than the bare hands or rolled-up paper that leaders used to wave.
Q 09Which instrument belongs to an orchestra's percussion section?
The cymbals
The cymbals. Percussion covers whatever is struck or shaken, yet when the modern orchestra took shape in the 1700s the whole section was just a pair of kettledrums played by one musician.
Q 10Which composer could already play keyboard and fiddle, and had started composing, by the age of five?
Mozart
Mozart. Soon afterwards his father took him and his sister Nannerl to play at the royal courts in Munich and Vienna, the first of many tours that showed the children off across Europe.
Q 11Which famous composer kept writing music even after he started to go deaf?
Beethoven
Beethoven. By the first performance of his Ninth Symphony he was so deaf that, in one famous telling, a singer had to turn him round so he could see the audience cheering.
Q 12Which children's song became the most-viewed YouTube video of all time in 2020?
Baby Shark
Baby Shark. For decades it was just a summer-camp singalong that nobody owned, until the children's brand Pinkfong made the dance video that overtook 'Despacito'.
Q 13Which character sings 'Let It Go' in Frozen?
Elsa
Elsa. She was written as a villain in early drafts, but once the songwriters handed in 'Let It Go' the filmmakers felt for her so much that they rewrote her as a heroine.
Q 21Which song sung by Bruno Mars did Billboard rank as America's biggest hit of the 2010s?
Uptown Funk
Uptown Funk. Officially it is producer Mark Ronson's record with Mars as the guest singer, and it sat at number one in America for 14 weeks in a row.
Q 22Which girl group did Beyoncé front before going solo?
Destiny's Child
Destiny's Child. The group started out as Girl's Tyme and lost on the TV talent show Star Search; only after Beyoncé's father took over as manager did a new name and a record deal follow.
Q 23Where does the boy band BTS come from?
South Korea
South Korea. A music producer began picking the seven 'Bulletproof Boy Scouts' for their singing, rapping and dancing in 2010, three years before their first release.
Q 14Which song's tune began as 'Good Morning to All', a greeting sung in a Kentucky kindergarten?
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday to You. The tune is credited to sisters Patty and Mildred Hill, who published it in 1893 as an easy song for small children; the birthday words were fitted to it later.
Q 15Which nursery rhyme shares the alphabet song's tune?
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' uses it too: the melody is an old French song, and the star words began as a poem by Jane Taylor that was only later set to it.
Q 16What style of music did Taylor Swift start out singing?
Country
Country. When she was a young teenager her family moved from Pennsylvania to a town just outside Nashville, purely so she could chase a record deal in the home of the genre.
Q 17Which song was the first single from Taylor Swift's album 1989, her first official pop record?
Shake It Off
Shake It Off. She wrote it as a cheerful reply to the people who picked on her in the press, and put it out ahead of 1989, the album she named after the year she was born.
Q 18Olivia Rodrigo starred as Nini in a Disney+ series spun off from which film?
High School Musical
High School Musical. Rodrigo wrote the song 'All I Want' herself for a 2019 episode of the series, an early taste of the songwriting that would soon make her a pop star.
Q 19Who writes and produces most of Billie Eilish's songs with her?
Her brother Finneas
Her brother Finneas. He wrote 'Ocean Eyes' for his own band, then asked his younger sister to sing it instead, and the recording they put online launched her career.
Q 20Where did Bruno Mars grow up?
Hawaii
Hawaii. From the age of four he performed in Honolulu with his parents' band, the Love Notes, and his Elvis Presley impression made him a local star.
Q 24Which song was BTS's first recorded fully in English?
Dynamite
Dynamite. Switching languages paid off at once: the disco-pop single entered America's Hot 100 at number one, the band's first chart-topper there.
Q 25Where does Ed Sheeran come from?
England
England. He grew up in the Suffolk town of Framlingham, then moved to London as a teenager and played hundreds of shows in small clubs before any record label signed him.
Q 26Which Disney Channel show made Sabrina Carpenter famous before her music career took off?
Girl Meets World
Girl Meets World. She played best friend Maya Hart for three years and was already making records for Disney's own label, yet pop stardom only arrived after the show had ended.
Q 27Which song from KPop Demon Hunters topped America's singles chart in the summer of 2025?
Golden
Golden. Its singers Rumi, Mira and Zoey are cartoon characters, yet the song spent weeks at number one on the real Hot 100, credited to the film's made-up group Huntrix.
Q 28Which English city were The Beatles from?
Liverpool
Liverpool. John, Paul and George had been playing its clubs together for years before the band took its name in 1960, and Ringo, the last to join, only arrived in 1962.
Q 29Which Beatles song ends with a long 'na na na' sing-along?
Hey Jude
Hey Jude. It began life as 'Hey Jules', which Paul McCartney is said to have made up in the car to comfort John Lennon's young son Julian while his parents were splitting up.
Q 30In Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' music video, what does he dance with?
Zombies
Zombies. Hollywood director John Landis shot the 14-minute video like a short horror film, in which Jackson himself turns into a monster before the dead climb out of their graves to dance.