I’ve been obsessing over import card sleeve cassette singles lately, especially Australian ones. Australian cassette singles are interesting because they usually mirrored releases from other countries like the USA, but sometimes there were some quirks that made them different. For example, some (like “Take A Bow” and “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore”) had cover art that was strangely ‘stretched out’. You can see in my picture that this made the “Take A Bow” cover appear to have a horizontal format instead of vertical. Other times, the front covers were exactly the same as the USA versions, but the back covers had their own unique layouts (you can see some of these below). Most of the Australian card sleeve cassingles were 2-track, except for “Rain” which was a 4-track maxi in a card sleeve (there was also a “Ray of Light” 4-track remix maxi in a card sleeve in 1998).
Australia was actually one of the first countries to experiment with releasing cassette singles for Madonna as far back as 1986, when they released maxi editions of some of the True Blue singles (“Papa Don’t Preach” and the title track). Those came in standard plastic cases with inserts. There were no further cassingles in Australia until they started back up again with the Like A Prayer album by releasing 2-track cassingles in paper/card sleeves. A few more Aussie maxi cassettes in plastic cases were released concurrently with the standard 2-tracks in 1990/91 (“Vogue”, “Hanky Panky”, “Justify My Love” and 2 versions of “Rescue Me”), but then were discontinued again for a final time.
Australian card sleeve cassingles are notoriously rare and susceptible to damage because the sleeves are made from either super thin paper or cardboard. The cardboard versions were perforated at the edges which made them especially prone to splitting over time due to the tape sliding in and out of them. It’s definitely difficult to find them in good condition, and even harder to find them sealed. All of them are pretty rare but I would say the rarest and most sought-after of them all would be “Bye Bye Baby”, especially since Australia was the only country in the world to issue a cassingle for this song. When this one comes up on ebay, it always commands a lot of money.
Australia released card sleeve cassingles all the way up until 1998. The final one was for “Drowned World/Substitute For Love”.
Albert's Madonna Collection 