The blog topic is ok. Your right bar got a lot of category A to Z and it's recommended to be removed if it's not useful. A bit of extra picture for your topic will be a huge improvement as well. Your music might take up bandwidth for people with slow internet access.
The first one seems a bit plain to me, in my opinion it needs a bit more spicing up. For the other site the design overall is plain which doesnt compliment the content i think its mainly that you are using wordpress than a real script in that particular niche