The philosophy of following vs favorites is that we automatically pick the channels you follow based on which ones you like the most songs from. It will work for the majority of the users. More "likes" = stronger relationship. However, the podcast is only limited to 20 songs per day for the channels with the strongest relationship, so only the minority of power users that have more than 20 songs a day will need to explicitly follow a channel or another to keep it in the podcast. But you are right, we need to communicate this better.