Cunningham, Sally JoDownie, J. StephenBainbridge, David2008-03-192007-04-302008-03-192005-09-01Cunningham, S. J., Downie, J. S., & Bainbridge, D. (2005). "The pain, the pain": Modelling music information behavior and the songs we hate. In Proceedings: Sixth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval. ISMIR 2005: 11-15 September 2005, London, U.K.https://hdl.handle.net/10289/79The paper presents a grounded theory analysis of 395 user responses to the survey question, "What is the worst song ever?" Important factors uncovered include: lyric quality, the "earworm" effect, voice quality, the influence of associated music videos, over-exposure, perceptions of pretentiousness, and associations with unpleasant personal experiences.application/pdfen(c) 2005 Queen Mary University of Londonuser studymusic information behaviourmusic recommender systems.Conference Contribution