New Delhi, June 26 -- LOS ANGELES - The key prop in Benson Boone's most-discussed music video of the summer is an empty seat.

In "The Time of My Life," released Thursday across digital platforms, the camera returns throughout to a single reserved chair in a theater audience, a vacancy standing in for the one person his character cannot stop thinking about. Everyone else is watching the show. He is watching what is not there. The song is about an ex-lover who will not come back. The woman onstage with him, playing his love interest through a theatrical medieval comedy, is Alix Earle, the TikTok personality who has spent six months accumulating evidence that she may no longer be just Boone's on-screen partner.

Whether the empty seat and E...