Song Records, Awards & Festivals Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the informal name for the tall steel barrier, several kilometres long, erected around the perimeter of the Somerset festival after the 2000 event, when an estimated 100,000 people without tickets got inside and safety limits were badly breached?

Question 2

What is the name for the annual American benefit concert, started in 1985 by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Neil Young to raise money and awareness for family farmers facing foreclosure, and still held every year since?

Question 3

What is the name for the arrangement by which a major artist signs on to play a long run of shows in a single purpose-fitted theatre in one city, so that the audience travels to them instead of the reverse?

Question 4

Which 2021 overhaul, prompted by years of accusations of bias and secrecy, abolished the small anonymous committees that had decided the final Grammy nominations in major categories and widened the pool of voting members?

Question 5

Which 2003 backlash followed a between-songs remark by a country trio's singer, on a London stage, that she was ashamed the US president came from her home state of Texas, days before the invasion of Iraq?

Question 6

What is remembered as a British institution in its own right, the drily sardonic, increasingly exasperated live television commentary that one broadcaster provided for the Eurovision Song Contest for 28 years until 2008?

Question 7

What is the name for the international music prize, founded in 1989 by the manager and lyricist of ABBA, that is awarded each year, usually to one figure from classical or art music and one from popular music, and presented by the King of Sweden with a large cash sum?

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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.