Hi Elmo,

This is an interesting question that we've seen come up a few times in support.

The short answer is that you can always test it to see what effect it has on your conversions.  Personally, I'm inclined to believe that it will hurt your conversions because a person might sit there and listen to the track, without signing up.

On the one hand, this will help shake out any duds from being on your mailing list.  That is to say that if they don't like the track, they won't sign up and you won't be filling up your autoresponder payment threshold with unresponsive people. (the price goes up the bigger your list gets).

On the other hand, they might like the track, but why sign up for the free track when you can just listen to it without signing up?  In this case I think you're giving folks an easy way out, that they'll undoubtedly take 99% of the time. 

My opinion is that you get people onto the list first.  Then later on down the line, you can check your open stats and see who has disengaged from your list and simply remove them.  Usually that means they aren't into your stuff and are not reading your messages.  I really think you should try to get them onto the list first before you give them a sample.

If you are targeting your visitors properly, they will be much more likely to sign up anyway, so why give away your offer without getting the contact info in return?

Again, this is just my opinion, trying to look at it from both sides.  You should test it though and see what happens.  You never know until you test.

Let us know how you make out.

Adding media like music and/or video can go either way. I've seen it hurt and I've seen it help. All you can really do is test both versions to see what works best in your case.