When a new song by the Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti emerges, the response from fans is frenzied: last year, a tune called Minute Maid appeared on YouTube and quickly racked up several million views, many fans hailing it as an instant classic. However, Playboi Carti had almost nothing to do with the song. While his voice was on it, he wasn’t involved with its production. In fact, at the moment of release he didn’t even know it existed.

Minute Maid is an example of a bizarre and engrossing new phenomenon in hip-hop: a work made not by the artist, but by one of their fans, and indistinguishable from the genuine article. Elements of tracks will leak from a studio session, usually via engineers or hangers-on, and these “snippets” of unfinished material make their way to listeners.

Minute Maid took shape after an Atlanta producer acquired a large number of Carti vocal stems – throwaway voice cuts, each only a few seconds long – from an unnamed leaker. That producer, an 18-year-old calling himself McFly, assembled these half-sentences and ad-libs into a song’s worth of verses and hooks. Next, he laid the stitched-together vocal over an instrumental obtained from a friend, which McFly believed to be a leaked beat by Carti’s longtime producer Pi’erre Bourne. Minute Maid was the result: a “new” Carti song, enthusiastically devoured by hordes of fans. The rapper himself never worked on the track beyond those ad-libs but listeners were none the wiser. “It’s crazy how big that song got,” McFly says. “Do you know how many people creamed their pants over it?”

Minute Maid, which has since been taken offline, proliferated through reposts on streaming platforms – one reached 4m YouTube views before being deleted. McFly tried to have the song expunged after learning that the beat he used wasn’t by Bourne at all, but by a 13-year-old producer, Martini Got Tha Acid. But the track spread too quickly to contain, and so McFly took up the honourable – if arduous – task of contacting reposters individually, demanding they credit the right person.

There are few mainstream rappers who have gone untouched by the new leak economy. Kanye West teased and eventually cancelled his project Yandhi; fans assembled the album that should have been with almost indignant swiftness, using leaks from the sessions. The best track of the bunch, 80 Degrees, was put together using snippets posted by West on Twitter and Instagram, plus snatches of demos that subsequently surfaced online.

Songs by Travis Scott have undergone similar fan surgery – keyboard work from his live performances is replicated by fans on synths at home, and those melodies added to the original songs; this way, fellow fans can enjoy the flourishes of a live show in studio quality, rather than listening to a phone recording. Fan revisionism has also reached Frank Ocean, most notably in the work of a YouTuber called Blomded, who merges various iterations of songs into chunky, completist-pleasing compound tracks, dubbed Ultimate Versions. The one for Nikes, for example, combines the original album track, the variant released with the music video, and a version with a guest verse from the Japanese rapper Kohh.

The community is animated by a DIY punk spirit and an easygoing attitude to copyright; it’s easy to draw parallels between it and the practices that led to the birth of rap in the first place. “Musical borrowing is the lifeblood of an art form like hip-hop,” says the musicologist Steven Gamble. “In the earliest days, turntablists in the south Bronx would loop the drum breaks from funk and soul as the basis for their own musical works. Now we’re seeing that with snippets – if you don’t like where an artist is going, you can make your own version.”

While Spotify is unlikely to go offline, leaks and snippets are at constant risk of being culled by copyright strikes. Gamble points out that downloading files – very old hat in the age of streaming – is the only way a listener can guarantee their continued access to a leak-based track. “I’ve done it myself with Brockhampton leaks,” he admits.

Some artists are less enthused. “Leaking isn’t advantageous to us – we need the traffic ourselves,” says Virgil Hawkins, a London rapper and member of the 237 collective. “There are people who would like to make a name for themselves off other people’s names.” Beyond that, he adds that having a track leak can feel violating for artists – it’s not pleasant, he says, to have unfinished work broadcast without your consent: “If you have a big plan for the song, it ruins the whole thing. You can’t take that moment back. It’s a bit of a pisstake, isn’t it?”

For McFly, however, working with snippets could be a route to genuine collaboration with the artists he admires. “I get asked if I’ve met Carti all the time,” he says. “And it’s like, no – but I feel like I have sometimes, you know? Honestly, I want him to hear [the work], like it, and say: ‘Come make me new shit!’”