Thom Yorke, Radiohead Artist, Releases Album via BitTorrent

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.