ALT Every music producer is looking for the next hit song. So when a paper claimed that machine learning can predict hit songs with 97% accuracy, it would have been music to their ears. News outlets, including Scientific American and Axios, published pieces about how this "frightening accuracy" could revolutionize the music industry. Earlier studies have found that it is hard to predict if a song will be successful in advance, so this paper seemed to be a dramatic achievement. Unfortunately for music producers, we found that the study's results are bogus. The model presented in the paper exhibits one of the most common pitfalls in machine learning: data leakage. This roughly means that the model is evaluated on the same, or similar, data as it is trained on, which makes estimates of accuracy exaggerated. In the real world, the model would perform far worse. This is like teaching to the test—or worse, giving away the answers before an exam.