Beka

Würzburg, the American south, and a demo tape that travelled

Benjamin Koeberlein was born in Würzburg on 3 August 1984. At nine he moved with his mother to the southern United States, and that is where he first ran into rap music. He came back to Germany at thirteen, and for a period he and his mother lived in a women's shelter — a detail he has never scrubbed out of the biography, and one that sits underneath a lot of the writing that followed.

The route in was the old one: record demos, post them to anyone in the country who might listen. The tapes reached the Berlin duo Hecklah & Coch, who cut the track "Mein Block" with him. It landed on Juice magazine's CD number 35, which in that era was the closest thing German rap had to a national noticeboard. From there came the mixtape years and the underground features that gave him a name before he had a label.

Blockstars, Wolfpack, and the Macher records

The first real lift came from Sido, who in 2011 brought him into the Austrian casting show Blockstars. Koeberlein — then working as Blut & Kasse, and earlier as BK — ended up in 3punkt5, the group that won it. He did not stay in a group. He went back to a solo run and, in 2013, signed to Wolfpack Entertainment, where he has been contracted ever since.

What followed was four albums in five years and a work ethic that got written into the titles. Macher oder Träumer arrived in 2013. The joint album 100% Macher, made with the rapper Pedaz, reached number 75 in Germany in 2014. Machermodus followed in 2015 and peaked at 83. JOOJ, in 2017, did slightly better at 72.

None of those are breakthrough numbers, and that is the honest shape of the career: a mid-chart artist with a durable audience rather than a crossover one. Three albums inside the German top 100 across four years is a working rapper's record, built on features, regional loyalty and volume of output rather than on one big radio moment.

"Melatonin", and giving up the old name

The big commercial moment did come, and it came in 2019, the same year he retired the Blut & Kasse name and became simply Beka. "Melatonin", recorded with Sido and Yonii, reached number 19 in Germany and was certified gold. It remains the highest chart position of his career and the track most new listeners arrive through.

After that he moved to shorter formats. The EP Shutdown came in 2020, Mic Drop in 2022, and a run of collaborations with other German rap acts filled the same period. The most recent release under his own name is the EP Alles für Blut & Kasse, put out on 29 March 2024 and catalogued as Deutschrap under Copyright Control — a title that reaches back and shakes hands with the name he dropped five years earlier rather than pretending it never existed.

Since that EP there has been no new album. The pattern of the last few years has been features, singles and stage work rather than a long record, which is worth knowing before anyone waits on an album cycle to explain the touring.

One of One: the pitch, and the pull-back

Beka is booked by sun*day entertainment, and its artist page sets out the 2026 proposition plainly: after years of opening for established acts including Gzuz, Sido and Jaill, this was to be his own headline run. The framing phrase was "one of one" — the agency's copy describes music that lives on contrasts, raw honesty against depth, street reality against reflection, and a refusal to chase whatever the scene is currently doing.

The One of One Tour 2026 was routed through clubs in April. The Berlin night was set for Thursday 16 April 2026 at LARK on Holzmarktstraße, doors at 19:00 and stage time at 20:00. Stuttgart was booked into Schräglage. Other German cities were on the sheet. It was the standard first-headline-tour scale: small rooms, a lot of driving, thin margins.

Then it came apart. In the run-up, Beka cancelled the tour and consolidated everything into one night. The reason he gave was his own diary, not the music: "Ich habe mich zeitlich komplett überschätzt – es ist einfach gerade viel los" — he had badly misjudged how much time he had, and there was too much going on. Ticket holders in Berlin, Stuttgart and the other cities were told to return their tickets to the point of purchase, with the suggestion that they get one for the surviving show instead.

The surviving show went to Würzburg, where he is from. Songkick's calendar lists it at the Bechtolsheimer Hof on 24 April 2026. The room sold out and the capacity was then increased, which put a limited second batch of tickets back on sale. Rather than a stripped-back consolation gig, it was pitched as a one-off: unannounced guest rappers, and a daytime meet-and-greet at which the tattooist Saesh54 was working on people before the doors even opened.

Where the live diary stands now

As of late September 2026 there is no published German routing to replace the one that was cancelled. The autumn and winter listings on his own booking agency's dates page run from October 2026 through to May 2027 and carry no Beka show at all. Nothing has been announced to suggest the April routing is being rebuilt for later in the year.

That leaves the live picture as a single hometown night rather than a tour, plus whatever comes through the support and festival channels that have carried most of his stage work for years. It also leaves the obvious question about a rapper of his standing — twenty years in, a gold single, a loyal regional base — which is whether the club-tour economics of a 2026 first headline run were ever going to work around the rest of his schedule. The answer he gave was that they were not, and he said so before taking anyone's money for a show he could not play.