I cancelled my Spotify account some time ago due to a band I liked at the time (Thank You Scientist) having their catalogue dropped making me realize that I do, in fact, own nothing -- but I was not happy about it.
During a trip back to my parents a couple of years ago I found an old CD binder of mine that was packed full of old music that I thought I had lost, so I took that home with me and started the slow process of ripping music to my hard drive. Foregoing MP3 I decided to rip them as WAVs since I have a big disk and a pair of Sony M4s and it was like a new sonic universe had been opened to me.
I have about 200 CDs in my collection now, a lot of them old ones that I did end up losing but repurchasing. There's apparently a niche enough market for them that some arbitrage can happen. For instance, using Amazon as a spot market I found a CD for $5 used at a local book store that sells for $40 minimum at Bezosland (Dance Gavin Dance - Mothership for those curious). My mom has also come in clutch, finding Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime at some flea market local to her and throwing it into my Christmas stocking last year.
I can't stress the quality of the music with a good set of headphones and a lossless rip. And best of all I own this music forever.
Don't use WAV files unless there's some very specific reason why you can't use FLACs. FLAC is lossless compression so you get a significantly smaller file size at zero quality cost.
Eh just the ease with which you can decode a wav. You can basically blit a wav out the shift register of an audio device, and it will sound like music. One might also argue the amount of space is trivial these days.
For archival, rip to bin/cue files and you'll be able to recreate the physical CD with your burner any time in the future.
I've always ripped to FLAC+CUE, that should be able to do the same thing.