Thom Yorke, frontman of the British rock band Radiohead, has released a new solo album on Friday via BitTorrent, a website long associated with the pirating of films and music.

Reports said it was the first time that an online file transfer system, often associated with piracy, has been used to sell music.

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Called "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes," it is Yorke's first solo album since "The Eraser" in 2006.

The new album features eight songs and could be downloaded for a minimal fee of US$6. But the first track, "A Brain in a Bottle," and its music video are already being offered for free.

After they have been charged, fans will have access to a "pay gate" built into the latest "BitTorrent Bundle" system.

"The new Torrent files have a pay gate to access a bundle of files. The files can be anything, but in this case is an 'album'," Yorke said in a statement.

"It's an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around," he added.

If it works, the singer said that BitTorrent could allow artists to sell their work directly to the fans and evade the "self-elected gate-keepers."

"If it works well, anyone can do this exactly as we have done," Yorke said.

"It could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work. Enabling those people who make either music, video, or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves," he added.

Yorke's band has already experimented alternative distribution techniques in the past.

You may remember that in 2007, Radiohead made waves in the entertainment industry by releasing its album "In Rainbows" via the band's website under the scheme "whatever price consumers wanted to pay."

The band's 2011 album "The King of Limbs" was also self-released online before physical CDs were distributed in the music stores.

Meanwhile, figures from the BitTorrent website showed that the "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes" album has been downloaded 116,000 times within the first 24 hours of its release.

Yorke's latest innovative release comes two weeks after rock icon U2 released their album "Songs of Innocence" for free on iTunes as part of a promotion with Apple Inc.

TagsRadiohead, Thom Yorke, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, BitTorrent, new album