Boone now has over 7 million followers on TikTok and nearly 300 million likes in total on his videos.
“I didn’t know I could sing before a year ago,” he told the judges, before belting out a cover so impressive that it brought Lionel Richie and Katy Perry to their feet, chanting Boone’s name.
At this point, Boone had amassed over a million TikTok followers and caught the attention of Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds.
The reward for a hit song on the platform is high: many of the songs in the Billboard Top 100 went viral on TikTok first.
Yet this Benson Boone character, who no-one over legal drinking age seems to have heard of, was number one.
