Despite the 15 years of passing time, many of the students shared similar media habits to this course's current students and myself!
In many cases, general types of media were still shared. The 2004 students listened to music, played video games, watched television, etc. However, some types of media were nonexistent; smartphones did not exist, social networks such as Twitter and Reddit had not been created, and current staples of modern media such as YouTube and Spotify were absent.
Even in the cases were high level media were the same, the specific instances were different. Unsurpisingly, the popular TV shows and video games of 2004 are not quite as popular in 2019. In the case of music, students bought individual songs on iTunes, some purchased physical CDs, and others used P2P sharing websites (which have largely been shut down due to copyright issues). The concept of paying a monthly subscription to get access to an entire library of music didn't seem to exist, as many of us do with Spotify and Apple Music. Additionally, video streaming was much less popular, probably due to slower internet speeds. In the last 15 years, computing devices have gotten more portable, more connected, and much faster; this had led to an explosion of cloud connected media platforms.
In some cases, specific TV shows and movies were shared by our past classmates, but the way it is accessed has changed, with Netflix and YouTube replacing DVDs and cable subscriptions.