"I don't listen to music for the nostalgia"

TL;DR: Nothing wrong with liking VGM for the nostalgia, it's a normal reaction to like things which bring back good memories, and one of the main goals of a lot of music is to brighten our day.

Nostalgia in relation to liking a certain piece or album is really a pretty normal occurrence. The sentiment is more obvious when we think of VGM because we can generally link those tunes to a very precise imagery and setting. Hence, we relive the experience of the game in question and, if it was a favorable one, it produces a warm fuzzy feeling during listening. If you really think about it a lot people do this with just about every kind of music they listen to. Often times a piece or artist will be associated with a certain period of their life and the memories it produced. This will usually be an unconscious thing for most people, but in general discovering new music outside of one's comfort zone can be a challenging experience, as novelty will often times be unsettling.

I'm a musician, so part of my "day job" if you will is to actively seek to enrich my musical palette with new and different styles and artists I have not heard before. Still, when I start listening to a style of music that I've not had much contact with, it usually takes a few listens before I can say that I enjoy it effortlessly. Obviously, this will sometimes not be the case if my personal preferences align well with said artist or style, but I'm still making a conscious effort to figure out what it is that makes the music interesting or different. So repeated listening obviously breeds familiarity as well, and VGM again is a type of music where you will usually hear a given track a great number of times if you are listening to it in its original context, by the very nature and function of VGM.

Now, as I said earlier, for a lot of people this is true for whatever music they like, and the period of their lives that will be associated with positive musical experiences will often be starting in their early or pre-teen years extending into early adulthood. Unless a person takes time to actively listen to new types of music, the new additions to their playlists will generally slow down quite a bit after this. That's why most people of a given generation will tend to like what was the hip thing during their day, and look at anything newer or older as just plain weird or bad music. Teenage years are formative years, and since at that time of a person's life they generally don't already have a bank of comforting memories associated with a pool of given tunes, they will be more receptive to what they are hearing and more easily prone to being influenced into listening to something different. This extends to video games and by extension to VGM as well since the older we get, the less time we have to discover new games and the more we will tend to want to relive good experiences with our favorite games in the time we do have to play.

This, however, is somewhat reduced in severity by the fact that in opposition to music as a means of entertainment, video games are still quickly improving in terms of form and presentation by simple virtue of the technological improvements related to their production. So I imagine most people will more easily reach for a newer video game as opposed to an album by an artist they have not heard before. Music production in terms of recording techniques and equipment has improved over this time as well, but the leaps in quality won't be perceived as much by the general listener. Recording quality has been acceptable since at least the 1960's, and the pool of well written music extends to way further back than that.

Another thing that may factor into the nostalgia for older VGM is the fact that modern games often times have soundtracks which are much more varied, both in stylistic terms and in terms of the length of the tracks. I've noticed a lot of games will also have much more ambient sounds, the background music often being much more subtle, since it has to contend with the other aural stimuli present, than in the games of yore. The fact that many games are now much more cinematic in nature means that there are more tracks that will only be heard once during a playthrough. Granted, this was also often true in older games, at the very least for final bosses and closing credits.

Speaking of my own experience as an example, I've played many newer games where I genuinely enjoyed the music but I'd be hard pressed to sing more than the main theme for most of them. And that's only because I get to hear it every time I fire up the game in most cases. There are still games where this is not true, but most of these are either games which are part of a series that has well established musical themes (e. g. Zelda, Mario, Castlevania, etc.) or games like Starcraft II, Civilization, or Heroes of Might and Magic, where the situation is closer to a traditional use of VGM by virtue of the fact that the game itself is closer to a traditional board game than most video games. Typical level-based platformers, sports games, and multiplayer oriented games also fall under this umbrella. I don't have a decent portable gaming device or a smartphone, but I imagine these are medium where the situation is still closer to the older eras of games as well.

Of course, I've not said anything with regards to the actual quality of the music in any of these cases. This is for good reason, as in my opinion there have been some pretty awesome compositions since the early years of VGM, and I'm of the opinion that the situation is no different today. There has been awful and trite ones all along as well, but that is true of just about any style of music or art form anyway.

So if you like music from certain games to the exclusion of others, don't feel bad about it, as one of the greater functions of music is precisely to heighten our mood and enhance our enjoyment of life. And in that optic, what difference does it make if nostalgia contributes to our choices or not?

Jam it back in, in the dark.