Vinyl Records
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Vinyl Records trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Vinyl records were written off more than once, yet people keep buying them, and the format carries well over a century of odd history. A record looks simple and hides a surprising amount of engineering, and almost everything about it, from the speed it turns at to the size of the hole in the middle, was fought over by rival companies before it became normal. This quiz covers the whole hobby. There are questions on how records are made and why they sound the way they do, on the formats and the terms collectors use, and on the labels and inventors who shaped the business. Others cover famous sleeves, rare and valuable pressings, the DJs who turned the turntable into an instrument, and the films and TV dramas set among the racks. It is written for collectors, crate diggers, pub quiz teams and anybody who has just bought a first turntable. Most questions can be reasoned out from the clue in the stem, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many separate grooves does a stylus follow across each side of a typical vinyl LP, from edge to label?
1
One continuous spiral runs from the rim to the label, so a needle set down at the edge can play the whole side without being moved.
Q 02Which 2021 Paul Thomas Anderson film borrows its title from an old slang nickname for a vinyl record?
Licorice Pizza
Licorice Pizza was a Los Angeles record shop chain, named after an expression that likens an LP to the colour of licorice and the shape of a pizza.
Q 03Which band hid looping gibberish in the run-out groove of a 1967 album, so it plays until the needle is lifted?
The Beatles
The Beatles closed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with the loop, straight after a 15-kilohertz tone that John Lennon suggested adding to annoy dogs.
Q 04Which pair of NASA probes, launched in 1977, each carry a gold-plated record of Earth's music and greetings?
Voyager
Voyager 1 and 2 each carry the copper disc, which is meant to be played at 16⅔ rpm and travels with its own stylus and playing instructions drawn on the cover.
Q 05The word album for a music collection comes from bound sets of 78 rpm discs that resembled books of what?
Photographs
Photographs gave the format its name: by about 1910, shops sold bound books of empty sleeves so buyers could file several three-minute discs together.
Q 06Which brittle resin, secreted by an insect, were most 78 rpm records pressed from before vinyl replaced it?
Shellac
Shellac is scraped from trees where the female lac bug leaves it, and at least 50,000 of the insects are needed to yield a single kilogram.
Q 07Which annual music award's trophy is a small gilded model of an early horn-speaker record player?
The Grammys
The Grammys take their name from the gramophone: organisers first planned to call the prizes the Gramophone Awards, then ran a mail-in contest for something shorter.
Q 08Which format did vinyl albums outsell in the United States in 2022, for the first time since 1987?
Compact discs
Compact discs sold about 33 million copies that year against more than 40 million vinyl albums, as revenue from records grew for a sixteenth year running.
Q 09Which Rolling Stones album's original vinyl sleeve, conceived by Andy Warhol, featured a real working zipper?
Sticky Fingers
Sticky Fingers unzipped to reveal a pair of white briefs, but the zip was costly to produce and damaged the vinyl record tucked inside.
Q 10Which DJ technique is Grand Wizzard Theodore widely credited with inventing while his mother was telling him off?
Scratching
Scratching began, by his account, when he held a record still to hear his mother's scolding and found himself rubbing it back and forth under the needle.
Q 11Which plastic, better known from plumbing pipes and cable insulation, are vinyl records pressed from?
PVC
PVC, short for polyvinyl chloride, is where the word vinyl comes from, and it let grooves sit more than twice as close together as the older brittle discs allowed.
Q 12At which speed, in rpm, does a standard 12-inch vinyl LP spin, a figure first used for film soundtrack discs?
33⅓
33⅓ rpm was first used in 1926 on the 16-inch Vitaphone discs that carried sound for early talking pictures, two decades before the LP reached shops.
Q 13Which term do collectors use for the lesser-known second track on a vinyl single?
B-side
B-side tracks have sometimes proved more successful than the songs they backed, and a double A-side is a single on which neither face is treated as secondary.
Q 21Which company answered the LP in 1949 by launching the 7-inch 45 rpm single with its large centre hole?
RCA Victor
RCA Victor was unwilling to license its rival's system, and the two-year standoff between the formats became known as the War of the Speeds.
Q 22Which German-born inventor created the flat disc record and the gramophone, rivalling Thomas Edison's phonograph?
Emile Berliner
Emile Berliner, who founded the United States Gramophone Company in 1894, had earlier invented a telephone transmitter that was one of the first microphones.
Q 23Which style of LP sleeve, popular from the mid-1960s, opens like a book to show artwork or lyrics inside?
Gatefold
Q 14Which Beatle's copy of the White Album, stamped with serial number 0000001, sold for $790,000 in 2015?
Ringo Starr
Ringo Starr's copy set a world record at auction; every sleeve carried its own stamped serial number, and the first four went to members of the band.
Q 15Which 1970s dance genre made the 12-inch single popular, giving club DJs longer and louder mixes?
Disco
Disco needed the room: giving one song a whole side let engineers space the grooves wider, which allows louder levels and a broader dynamic range.
Q 16Which gemstone, polished to a tiny point, typically forms the tip of a modern turntable stylus?
Diamond
Diamond became the standard tip after decades of single-use steel needles, which the abrasive old discs quickly wore down to fit the groove.
Q 17Which storage position does the Library of Congress recommend for vinyl records to keep them in good shape?
Upright on edge
Upright on edge is the rule for discs, and the same guidance asks for sturdy dividers every few inches to support the whole face of each sleeve.
Q 18Which 2000 John Cusack film, based on a Nick Hornby novel, is set in a Chicago record shop called Championship Vinyl?
High Fidelity
High Fidelity moved the story from London to Chicago, yet Hornby said it sometimes felt like a film in which John Cusack reads his book.
Q 19What do the letters EP stand for on a record that holds more music than a single but less than an album?
Extended play
Extended play releases usually run 15 to 30 minutes, and they have long been popular with punk and indie bands because they are cheaper and quicker to make.
Q 20Which American label unveiled the long-playing record at a New York hotel press conference in June 1948?
Columbia
Columbia showed off the LP at the Waldorf-Astoria after its engineers were set the target of at least 20 minutes a side, where a 10-inch 78 held about three.
Gatefold sleeves fold shut to the size of a standard cover, and progressive rock made them famous with sprawling paintings by artists such as Roger Dean.
Q 24Which direct-drive turntable, introduced in 1972, became the standard deck for hip hop and club DJs?
Technics SL-1200
Technics SL-1200 decks kept turning at the correct speed even while a DJ wiggled the record by hand, because the motor drives the platter directly.
Q 25Which founder of Third Man Records paid $300,000 at auction for a disc from Elvis Presley's first recording session?
Jack White
Jack White bought the 1953 disc of My Happiness, and two years after the sale his label opened the first record pressing plant in Detroit since 1965.
Q 26Which Bronx DJ pioneered hip hop in 1973 by using two copies of one record to stretch out its drum break?
DJ Kool Herc
DJ Kool Herc called the dancers who waited for those stretched-out breaks break-boys and break-girls, which is where b-boy and b-girl come from.
Q 27Which audio advance reached records in the late 1950s by cutting a separate channel into each wall of the groove?
Stereo sound
Stereo sound in a single groove was conceived and patented by Alan Blumlein of EMI in 1931, more than 25 years before such discs went on general sale.
Q 28Which country's LP releases traditionally come with an obi, a paper strip folded around the sleeve?
Japan
Japan uses the same word for the sash tied around a kimono, and the strip lets shoppers see what an album contains; a second-hand record that still has its obi can be worth more.
Q 29Which singer-songwriter's unreleased tapes filled Great White Wonder, the 1969 LP seen as rock's first notable bootleg?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan had taped some of the songs with The Band in West Saugerties, New York, in 1967, and others in Minneapolis six years before that.
Q 30Which bandleader received the first literal gold record in 1942, for 1.2 million sales of Chattanooga Choo Choo?
Glenn Miller
Glenn Miller got the disc from his own label, because early gold records were publicity gestures by record companies; an industry-wide award scheme only began in 1958.