If your sites look a lot worse in IE it is because you are not designing for them. If you are not designing for them you are doing yourself and your clients an injustice. I'm no fan of M$, but simple logic dictates that if 75% of your prospective audience use IE then you had better look after them. Making a website cross browser compatible is not extremely hard, it just takes willingness and a bit of planning. You should also take into consideration the various monitor sizes being used and design for the majority value. Your sample sites required vertical and horizontal (a big usability no-no) scrolling, even on a 1024x768 screen, the de-facto standard.
Searching the net and taking ideas from sites you like the look of is not stealing, it's getting inspiration. I don't think the suggestion was that you visit another bands site and copy it verbatim. Rather that you research what other sites, not only band sites, are doing, and get ideas about look, layout, colourschemes, etc. Every designer in every field does this. They take inspiration from everything around them. As a designer, the only way you could not do this is if you were locked in a windowless, featureless room from birth, with no visual stimulation. But then you wouldn't be able to design because you would have no reference points.
From a design point of view the sample sites lack any focus or impact. There's nothing there that jumps out. From a usability point of view you would score extremely low on a Niellsen rating.
Have a look around at what other sites are doing, in all fields - business, entertainment, personal, sport - and start getting inspiration from them. And visit
http://www.useit.com/ and read up on Jakob Nielsens Web Usability guidelines. You can learn a lot from that site alone about the layout and functionality of your sites.