Radiohead's Thom Yorke may have made almost $24 million from a solo album he released exclusively through BitTorrent, the popular file transfer protocol, according to calculations by the Digital Trends blog.

While the protocol is commonly exploited for pirating movies and music, BitTorrent recently launched a product that allows artists to mix paid content with free content, called BitTorrent Bundle.

Yorke used BitTorrent Bundle to release his newest solo album, which offers a bundle of seven songs for $6, along with another song and a music video for free.

By offering his latest album, called "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes," over BitTorrent, Yorke became the most legally downloaded BitTorrent artist in 2014.

BitTorrent's year-end retrospective says the album had been downloaded 4.4 million times, which means that total revenue generated by the album could be as high as $26 million.

BitTorrent doesn't keep much of that money. In fact, 90% of the revenue goes to the artist, which means Yorke could have made about $24 million.

But as GigaOm and others have pointed out, it's not clear exactly how many of those 4.4 million downloads were actually paid. Some users may have only downloaded the free part.

Regardless of how much Yorke actually made through the project, his success provides some evidence that BitTorrent isn't just for free downloads. Artists have an opportunity to make some real money.