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.”