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50 free Music Genres trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 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 is the steady bass-drum pulse under nearly every disco record. It is usually paired with a hissing hi-hat and a syncopated bass line, the combination that kept dancefloors moving.
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. Several sources trace his find to '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 was Hilly Kristal's plan for a roots-music bar at 315 Bowery, but the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Blondie and Talking Heads turned it into punk's home instead.
Q 05Which industrial English city produced Black Sabbath, whose guitarist lost fingertips at a factory?
Birmingham
Birmingham's noisy factories and metalworking are credited with shaping the chugging, metallic sound of Black Sabbath and of heavy metal in general. Unable to play normally, Tony Iommi tuned 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 by Dave Mustaine, Metallica's original lead guitarist, after Kirk Hammett replaced him, which makes the 'Big Four' a family feud as much as a scene. Exodus and Testament were Bay Area peers who never matched them.
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 encouraged the media to call the Seattle sound 'grunge', and the 1988 mail-order catalogue describing Green River's Dry as a Bone EP is the first recorded use of the word for the city's bands.
Q 09Cumbia, danced today from Mexico to Argentina, began on the Caribbean coast of which country?
Colombia
Colombia's Caribbean coast is cumbia's cradle, where the dance is said to descend from Afro-Colombian funeral traditions. 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 of the phrase, and the style was a genuinely new way of playing samba: João Gilberto's stammering guitar rhythm under a near-whispered vocal line.
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, an electronic take on a West African instrument, are amapiano's signature, sitting under piano melodies borrowed from deep house and kwaito. The genre's name is Zulu for 'pianos'.
Q 14Bhangra, the Punjabi harvest-dance music, is driven by which two-sided drum played with two sticks?
Dhol
The dhol is bhangra's best-known instrument, struck with a stick in each hand. The tumbi and sarangi traditionally play over it; synthesizers and guitars arrived later.
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 16K-pop idols typically spend years living and drilling under an agency before debut, in what method?
The trainee system
The trainee system was popularised by Lee Soo-man of SM Entertainment in the late 1990s, and a 2012 report put the cost of training one idol at an average of three million US dollars.
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 popularised 'Jazz Age' as the label for the years between the end of World War I and the 1929 crash, and The Great Gatsby became its defining portrait. Prohibition-era speakeasies were the music's liveliest venues.
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 of T. Rex was, in critic Ken Barnes's words, 'the man who started it all', and 'Hot Love' became his first UK number one. David Bowie only began building his Ziggy Stardust persona later that year.
Q 19Which squeezebox, named by a German dealer and intended for church music, became the voice of tango?
Bandoneón
The bandoneón takes its name from Heinrich Band, the German instrument dealer who intended it for religious and popular music; emigrants and sailors carried it to Argentina around 1870. By 1930 Germany was shipping 25,000 a year there.
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 their single 'Color Him Father', and the band received no royalties for what became one of the most sampled drum breaks ever. In 2026 it entered the US National Recording Registry.
? 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 persuaded Chrysalis, which had wanted to sign his band outright, to fund a label releasing 15 singles a year instead. Its rude-boy mascot Walt took his name from an old American bowling shirt Dammers 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. The Moody Blues' Mike Pinder used one on every album from Days of Future Passed in 1967 to Octave in 1978.
Q 29Which Austin band put 'psychedelic rock' on third-eye business cards, then in a 1966 album title?
13th Floor Elevators
The 13th Floor Elevators formed in late 1965 to spread LSD consciousness, and The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, released that October, is the earliest known use of 'psychedelic' on an album cover.
Q 30Which 1967 film gave Flatt and Scruggs's bluegrass 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown' a worldwide audience?
Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde used the tune so frequently that a banjo breakdown became the sound of 1930s outlaws on the run. Deliverance and its 'Dueling Banjos' came later.