How To Host A ‘Name That Tune’ Party On Zoom

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Want to get away from the worry and stress for a couple of hours, and do something fun on Zoom with your family or friends?

Try hosting a game of “Name That Tune” – it’s easy to do, and super fun.

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To connect in this stressful time, my family’s been playing games every weekend via Zoom, mostly trivia and stuff like that. Every week, a different person hosts. When it was my turn, I decided to do ‘Name That Tune.’ It was a blast… lots of dancing, laughing, singing and Type A competitiveness.

Here’s how I did it, and you can too:

Organize your music in advance.

First I spent some time picking out the music on Spotify, adding songs to playlists. I picked thirty songs, and organized them into six ’rounds,’ including a practice round.

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Decide on your rules.

Since I had a mix of generations and musical knowledge on the teams, I wanted to make it easy to get points. So my rules were:

  1. After I play the first few seconds of a song, first team to raise their hand gets to answer.
  2. They can guess the artist, song title, album, or writer of the song, and get one point for each correct answer.
  3. For two extra points, they can sing some lyrics (not just the title or well-known refrain) from the song.
  4. Teams can ask for help from other teams.

Start the meeting; share “Music or Computer Sound Only” with attendees.

Zoom lets you share system audio from your computer (including simultaneous audio from the Spotify player and your microphone) with your Zoom attendees, without sharing your screen.

Here’s how:

  1. First open Zoom on your Mac and start your meeting.
  2. Then in the Zoom menu bar at the top of your Mac, select “Start Share” from the “Meeting” dropdown.
  3. Then in the Zoom meeting window, select the “Advanced” tab.
  4.  Select “Music or Computer Sound Only,” and start sharing.

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Get feedback on your audio levels.

Before starting the game, do a sound check with a sample song.

Play a test tune and ask your attendees if they can hear it ok, or if it’s too loud or soft. Adjust to taste using the volume slider at the bottom right of the Spotify app (player), not the audio controls on your keyboard.

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You may have to keep adjusting the volume as you go, since some songs are louder on Spotify than others. It also helps to turn down the Spotify volume when you want to talk over a song – for example if you want to give a hint, without stopping the song. Note that you can use the space bar to pause and re-start the music at will – much easier than hitting play and pause with your mouse.

Hope you have fun… we did!