Miley Cyrus said via Twitter on Wednesday she’s “kinda bummed” that her new Walmart-only EP “The Time of Our Lives” went on sale earlier than planned, denying her a chance of topping the U.S. album charts.

The seven-track disc sold 62,000 copies during the week ended Sunday, Aug. 30, according to tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan, after hitting shelves on Friday. Albums are normally released on Tuesday, not Friday, but the shortened time span of three days of sale for Cyrus’ album was good enough to land it No. 3 on the Billboard 200 Wednesday.

The CD had originally been set to come out on Monday, head-to-head with Whitney Houston’s first album in seven years, “I Look To You,” which is now the unchallenged pretender to the Billboard 200 crown next Wednesday with estimated sales of about 200,000 copies. Cyrus is unlikely to match that, if for no other reason than the fact many of her fans already picked up her album over the weekend.

“Kinda bummed,” Cyrus wrote on Twitter (pictured at left in happier times, performing at the “Today” show in New York last Friday.) “My E.P. got put on shelves (with) my clothing line and got released 3 days early on accident :(” 
   
A source close to the situation said the EP is tied in with her “Miley & Max” fashion line, which boasts a big presence in Walmart’s junior clothing department.

“In order to be prepared for street date, and subsequent assembly and stock placement of a huge number of display units, they put her CDs out early,” the source said on condition of anonymity. 

Emails sent to Walmart and to Cyrus’ Walt Disney Records label were not immediately answered.
   
It’s not clear if Cyrus would have gone to No. 1 anyway. Her previous release, the soundtrack to her “Hannah Montana” movie, opened at No. 2 in April with 136,000 copies. It hit the top two weeks later with 196,000 copies, buoyed by the movie’s first-place debut at the North American box office. She previously went to No. 1 in July 2008 with a 371,000-unit start for “Breakout” — her first album under her own name as opposed to her Hannah Montana alter ego.

Lead singer Liam Gallagher has issued a typically blunt rebuttal to rumours and speculation that Oasis, arguably Britain’s biggest band of the ’90s, had played their final gig.

The rumours began after Liam and his older brother Noel, the band’s guitarist and songwriter, announced they had fallen out and were communicating via the band’s website or on Twitter. Then, when Oasis cancelled a gig at the last minute over the weekend, the doomsayers went into overdrive.

The reason for the band’s pullout was actually Liam contracting viral laryngitis, but that did not stop the columnists rushing to fill their columns. Liam, who thrives off his bad boy, rock’n'roll image, was clearly not impressed.

“Reports in the smartarses column about Oasis last british gig ever. The kids talking out his arse.” Lax grammar aside, the message was clear, although could Gallagher really be that annoyed at all the free publicity?

The website further explained that Oasis, behind hits like “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova”, would complete its world tour and then take a break before thinking about recording another album.

Back on Sunday, “Waiting on the World to Change” singer John Mayer intimated on his Twitter page that he was looking to take a break from the social networking website for people with short attention spans.

“Suffering cerebral atrophy,” Mayer wrote. “Since I’ve been communicating in short pulses, I’ve been writing lyrics the same way.”

In a follow-up post, Mayer added: “The single-serve idea is killing my writing. Laying off a little in the coming weeks. Need books, thoughts, a sequence of ideas that build.”

All well and good. After all, communicating with your fans in 140 characters or less can be limiting. But then Mayer followed that pair of Sunday posts with a number of new Twitter updates.

Mayer is reportedly at work on a new album. So on Monday he wrote “Doing vocal warmups, trying to simulate that 1am singing vibe in the afternoon.”

Later in the day, he described the catch-a-butterfly feeling of trying to compose a song with the barest elements of it wafting around in his head. Then on Tuesday came these words of wisdom: “Writer’s block cure: accept temporary suckage.”

Since then, at least a dozen Twitter posts have appeared on Mayer’s page, including musings about a hummingbird and a statement about the disturbing use of the hardcore drug crystal meth by youths.

So much for Mayer’s pledge to lay off Twitter. Can the world expect the sound of silence to reign sometime soon from the Twitterific pop star? Who knows.

Mayer is one of the most frequent celebrity users of Twitter, and in recent months he has mocked celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, faked a friend’s trip to the hospital and hinted he was buying an engagement ring for then girlfriend Jennifer Aniston (they have since broken up).  Good times.

And even if Mayer can’t keep quiet on Twitter, when he played guitar at the Michael Jackson memorial this month he respectfully did it without singing, earning a few kind words from critics.

Movie studios are recognizing the increasing importance of word-of-mouth fan reaction in making successes or failures of their big budget movie releases. Check out the Reuters story on that topic here. Hollywood studios see an opportunity to reach potential movie goers through social networking websites like Twitter, and to market movies in ways other than the traditional trailer/television spot/billboard approach.

Universal Pictures, the company behind the movie “Bruno” that opened a week ago, actually sought to create buzz about the film by not marketing it, at least not right away. Universal delayed the release of its trailer and other advertising material for “Bruno” for a couple months, because it knew that the many fans of lead actor Sacha Baron Cohen would chatter about the movie online, said Adam Fogelson, president of marketing and distribution for the studio. With that delayed approach, the studio allowed fans to lead the talk about “Bruno” and give the subversive movie a cutting-edge feel, by not oversaturating them with advertisements and trailers.

Over at Walt Disney Studios, executives are also paying attention to the growth in importance of word-of-mouth fan reaction. Chuck Viane, president of distribution for the studio, said that to generate the right kind of word-of-mouth, filmmakers are making last-minute tweaks that will get fans reaching for their cell phones, but for the right reason.

“A lot of times, walking out of a theater, the last thing that you want to leave a customer with is a smile, and that’s why (filmmakers) find the appropriate outtakes,” Viane said.

For its alien movie “District 9,” studio Sony Pictures has encouraged the public to call in reports of “non-human activity,” and the studio said it has received more than 20,000 calls a day.

Movies that appear to have benefited from strong word-of-mouth this summer include comedies “The Hangover” and “The Proposal.” Films that have nosedived at theaters after opening strong include “Terminator Salvation” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” leading some box office watchers to suggest that audiences told their friends to stay home and not go to those films.

Television studios have used Twitter and social networking for some time to generate word-of-mouth. Hardie Tankersley, an online strategist for Fox Broadcasting, said his company could go further than it has by hitching a live Twitter feed on TV shows to Fox’s website, and including negative comments in the feed.

That can be a daunting challenge from Hollywood’s perspective.

“Shaping the conversation is extremely difficult and probably impossible,” Tankersley said. “People are going to say what they’re going to say. We try to contribute to the discussion but I don’t think we’re so arrogant to think that we can shape the conversation.”

Want some good news about Aerosmith’s troubled tour? Dream On. The veteran rockers have officially postponed shows scheduled for Saturday in Tampa and Monday in Sunrise/Ft. Lauderdale, after a few days of confusion as to whether they would proceed. Seven shows have now been scrapped as a result of an unspecified leg injury suffered by 61-year-old singer Steven Tyler.

The trek kicked off on June 10 in St. Louis, and the band managed to perform seven shows through June 29 before Tyler (pictured left with guitarist Joe Perry at the American Music Awards last November) was hobbled. Initial sympathy expressed by fans on the official message board at Aeroforceone.com is now turning into frustration as they have to cancel travel and accommodation plans, babysitters and the like.

Perry’s Twitter messages did not help. He told fans on Wednesday that the shows in Florida would not go ahead, but then changed tack the following day saying there had been a misunderstanding.

The good news is that guitarist Brad Whitford, who was sidelined by a head injury just before the tour started, is ready to rejoin his bandmates once Tyler is back in the saddle. All eyes are now on the Atlanta show scheduled for Wednesday.

The band says the seven shows (so far) will be rescheduled but has not confirmed any details. Perry said on a Florida radio station Friday that he hoped to be back in October. Dates are on tap through Sept. 16 in Detroit.

NBC wouldn’t save it, but could Twitter rescue the axed TV comedy “My Name is Earl”?

Actor Ethan Suplee, who plays Earl’s buffoonish brother Randy Hickey on the four year-old American comedy show, has a Twitter campaign aimed at trying to persuade another U.S. television network to pick up the series, which NBC said  this week it was dropping from its fall schedule.

“If it’s just a matter of some people saying, ‘We want to watch the show,’ let’s see if some people want to say that,” Suplee told Web site PopEater.com.

“Ultimately there are just a couple more episodes that I’d like to see done. It doesn’t have to be the show that runs infinitely, but there are a few episodes that ['Earl''s creator Greg Garcia] wanted to make, that I was excited about making. Just to close it out - is this guy stuck making amends for the rest of his life?” Suplee said of the cliffhanger that ended the fourth season.

As of Friday the campaign on behalf of the Emmy-award winning comedy had attracted just over one million followers on Twitter.

And whether it succeeds or not in bringing the show back to a TV screen somewhere, the petition has notched up a new entry into the English language –  the first known use of the word “Twitition.”

Game on. The race to 1 million followers on Twitter has a new player, after singer Britney Spears’ manager made it known she has joined the competition.

For those who have not heard about it, the race started earlier this week when actor Ashton Kutcher challenged cable news channel CNN to a Twitter duel, promising to ring CNN founder Ted Turner’s doorbell if he wins. Not one to shy from attention, CNN broadcaster Larry King put out a video online responding to Kutcher’s challenge. “CNN will bury you,” King vowed, as he also lectured Kutcher that Turner no longer runs CNN.

Then on Wednesday, Spears’ manager posted the following statement on her Twitter page. “Let’s get Brit across the million mark!,” he wrote. It was the equivalent of the United States joining World War I after sitting on the sidelines, because Spears is a Twitter powerhouse with more than 940,000 followers as of Thursday afternoon.

So far, Kutcher’s Twitter page sports more than 966,000 followers while CNN’s breaking news Twitter page has an impressive tally of more than 973,000 followers. 

The race goes on, but it could obscure the fact that even many avid Internet users are hardly fans of Twitter, which allows anyone to update friends and followers on the most minute aspects of their day. But it’s all for a good cause. Kutcher has pledged to donate to the Malaria No More fund if he wins, and CNN has agreed to also donate to the cause if it beats the 31-year-old actor and star of the movie “Dude, Where’s My Car?”