The great riddle facing the record industry in the digital age has been pricing — Napster and its ilk offered up music for free in the late 1990s, while major labels largely have clung to an average of $13 for CDs despite plummeting sales and seasons of downsizing.

Now, one of the most acclaimed rock bands in the world, Radiohead, is answering that marketplace riddle with a shrug: "It's up to you," reads a message on the Web page where fans can pre-order the band's seventh album and pay whatever they choose, including nothing.

The British band that twice has been nominated for a best-album Grammy will sidestep the conventional industry machinery Oct. 10 by releasing "In Rainbow" as a digital download with no set price. The album will be available only from the band and www.radiohead.com.

It might sound like a gimmicky promotion, but industry observers Monday framed it in more historical terms — Radiohead, they said, is the right band at the right time to blaze a trail of its own choosing.

"This is all anybody is talking about in the music industry today," said Bertis Downs, the longtime manager of R.E.M., the veteran alt-rock band inducted in 2007 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "This is the sort of model that people have been talking about doing, but this is the first time an act of this stature has stepped up and done it. ... They were a band that could go off the grid, and they did it."

Radiohead is hardly abandoning the idea of making money.

The Web site also will sell a deluxe edition of "In Rainbow" that comes with versions in three formats (CD, vinyl and download) along with eight bonus songs and a lavish hardcover book with lyrics, photos and a slipcase. That package costs 40 British pounds (about $82).