Perhaps you heard over the weekend that Rihanna released a new song in collaboration with Kanye West and Paul McCartney, and if you're like me, you navigated to YouTube this morning hoping to hear it. What you likely found wasn't "FourFiveSeconds," the acoustic duet they actually released, but the G-funk instrumental above. What's going on here?

Unless you're in the mood for a hastily-assembled cover, "FourFiveSeconds" is difficult to find on YouTube. (I got so frustrated looking for a free streaming version that I actually bought it on iTunes.) Instead, a legion of impostors compete for your attention, each claiming
FULL SONG (Official) status and offering music that doesn't remotely resemble the actual the actual track. The above version has racked up 282,000 views since Saturday; several competing versions also have six-figure play counts.

The weird pretenders—uploaded solely to capitalize on search interest in "FourFiveSeconds"-harken back to headier days in legally dubious online music, when unknown rappers would tag their cheaply recorded freestyles with the name of Eminem's new single before uploading them to Kazaa, or you'd download a Radiohead album only to find that Bennington College's greatest space-rock band had appended their own jam to the end of side one.

It's a good stunt, but not the most effective marketing scheme if you're trying to find an audience. The problem, then as now, is that there often isn't any way to figure out who you're actually listening to. For whomever is uploading Rihanna videos, that might immaterial: many of them link in their descriptions to GoStudioOne.com, a spammy-looking site peddling lyrics and free mp3 streams, and the impostor campaign is likely a ploy to drive traffic.

But some of the songs are actually decent. What are they?

There's a perfectly good disco instrumental.

A struggle rapper freestyling on a terrible bootleg of the "Stay Schemin'" beat.

Another perfectly good dance track.

Three minutes of total silence.

More struggle rap.

More silence.

A robot voice reading a blog post.

And so on.

Only one upload provides any information about the actual song—a track by a Toronto rapper named Thrilla. The rest are a mystery, and Shazam hasn't been helpful for identifying them. If you hear anything you recognize, let us know in the comments.