Is the theory that this will be more resistant to copyright takedowns (given the talk about "sharing music with friends") because takedowns will have to be issued to individual pods?

Does this pay artists? I can't find any mention of it on their website.

They claim to specialize in copyleft content, so almost certainly not. The cynic in me thinks that in practice it'll be a fancy frontend for everybody's BitTorrent downloads folder... with an archive.org downloader script for some plausible deniability.