Just in; Newly album release by the prominent Radiohead artist.

Thom Yorke of Radiohead is known for experimenting with distribution. Radiohead let fans pay any price for “In Rainbows.” Credit…Chad Batka for The New York Times

Seven years ago, Radiohead attempted a bold experiment in media distribution by letting its fans pay any price — even nothing — for the band’s album “In Rainbows.”

On Friday, Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s lead singer, tried another unusual approach by releasing his solo album, “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes,” through BitTorrent, a technology for transferring large files over the Internet. The data “bundle” that included the album cost $6, and in a statement, Mr. Yorke described the move as a test of a new way for artists to release their work online.

“If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to the people who are creating the work,” Mr. Yorke wrote in a note also signed by his longtime producer and collaborator, Nigel Godrich.

Mr. Yorke and Mr. Godrich are outspoken and respected advocates of artists’ rights in the digital age. Their use of BitTorrent is a powerful endorsement for the technology and the company behind it, also called BitTorrent, which has been trying to repair its public image as a piracy medium by striking innovative distribution deals with musicians, filmmakers and even schools.

The BitTorrent system is used by 170 million people around the world to share files, the company says, and recently stars like Moby and Madonna have used the technology to release music. The Berklee College of Music disseminates course materials through it.

But at the same time, BitTorrent remains a hugely popular outlet for pirated content. According to a study commissioned by NBCUniversal, 6.7 petabytes — a petabyte is one million gigabytes — of unauthorized content was traded on BitTorrent last year, and that number is growing quickly.

Matt Mason, BitTorrent’s chief content officer, took pains to distance the company from the file-transfer software that bears its name, which, he said, as open-source code, is not controlled by the company. “There are 170 of us at BitTorrent, and we go to work every day trying to figure out how we can help artists,” he said.

Mr. Yorke’s new album, Mr. Mason said, was BitTorrent’s first “pay-gated bundle,” meaning that the full album could be downloaded only after a customer pays. BitTorrent collects 10 percent of the fee, Mr. Mason said, and the rest goes to the artist. By Friday afternoon, “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” had been downloaded more than 60,000 times.

Despite the company’s successes with bundles, it still faces skepticism in the entertainment industry.

“The reason they have this massive installed base is because of piracy,” said Chris Castle, a music industry lawyer in Austin, Tex. “Now they want us to turn a blind eye to that and let them profit, after all these years you’ve been a core part of ripping off everybody in sight? That’s a bit hard to take for some people.”

In past interviews, Mr. Yorke has expressed mixed feelings about the legacy of the pay-what-you-wish model for his album, “In Rainbows.” And in their announcement on Friday, Mr. Yorke and Mr. Godrich seemed slightly cautious, twice describing the release as an “experiment” in both technology and in control of content. But they were also hopeful.