What has made 98 Degrees, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, LFO, Natural, O Town and even N’Sync to go on a hiatus? Apparently, it’s the genre of their music itself.

Andy Greenwald, a senior contributing writer for Spin magazine, tells Larry Rodgers of The Arizona Republic that the changing tastes of young listeners over the past two years may well have prompted the above mentioned acts to disappear for a while.

“They call teen pop ‘bubble gum’ for a reason. It is because the flavour is eventually going to wear off,” Andy said.

“There’s only so far you can take the music and the genre. As the artists start to chafe against the limitations of it as they get older and their fans get older, they’re going to come to a parting of the ways. So essentially when that happens, they try to approach other styles of music in order to appeal to a wider audience and constantly try to change their sounds with perhaps a Latin-tinged flavour or a rock sound.”

Natural’s Marc Terenzi is milking all the publicity he can over a report he’s dating Britney Spears.

Marc told Extra TV “I think it’s interesting. I don’t know where they came from or where they started”. While Britney’s representatives denied it and said it was a shameless publicity move, Marc said cryptically “You never know, anything is possible in the music industry. People can figure it out on their own.”

The gossip comes conveniently ahead of the band’s new album out on the 2nd of September and their debut single ‘Put Your Arms Around Me’ should be available in record stores right this instant.