Radiohead earned a reputation for seeking unusual ways to distribute its music to fans seven years ago, when they let listeners choose how much they were willing to pay for the band’s album “In Rainbows.” The band’s singer Thom Yorke continued the unusual tradition on Friday, when he announced fans can download his solo album, “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes,” through BitTorrent as a $6 data “bundle.”

Yorke chose the popular data transferring site as his means of distribution for “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” in hopes of finding new ways for artists to release music 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,” wrote Yorke in a statement co-signed by producer and his long-time collaborator, Nigel Godrich. “If it works, anyone can do this exactly as we have done.”

BitTorrent came under fire last year when a study commissioned by NBCUniversal revealed that 6.7 petabytes of unauthorized content was traded on the site in 2013,
BitTorrent has been struggling to repair their reputation as a piracy medium by making distribution deals with musicians, filmmakers and even schools, and this endorsement by two well-respected individuals in the music community may increase trust in the BitTorrent technology. Regardless of their shady reputation, the site is still used by 170 million people around the world to share files.

“There are 170 of us at BitTorrent, and we go to work every day trying to figure out how we can help artists,” said Matt Mason, BitTorrent’s chief content officer.

“Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” was downloaded more than 60,000 times since Friday afternoon, and while BitTorrent only collects 10 percent of the $6 fee, some argue that even this is too much for a company who illegally profited off of musicians for so many years.

“The reason they have this massive installed base is because of piracy,” said music industry lawyer Chris Castle. “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.”